The Bella Swan Scholarship Fund
by eiluned price
Summary: Bella's discovery of an unwanted gift provokes an unintended reaction. AU.
1. Chapter 1

_Disclaimer: This is inspired by one of SMeyer's outtakes from "New Moon" that her editor (wisely!) told her to delete. There is some language from both the outtake and "NM" in here, but I lay claim to none of it._

_Looking for the epilogue of "Getting Warmer"? It's been posted._

* * *

><p>Chapter 1:<p>

"That's it, Bella!" Charlie's voice erupted in my ears as I stared at the small white bowl on the bumpy veneer of the kitchen table without really registering that it was filled with something that I was supposed to eat. _Cereal._ My head snapped up in surprise.

"I'm sending you to Renee, to Jacksonville," Charlie went on, his voice harsh, as he glared at me from across the table. "You can't spend your days moping around, doing nothing."

"I am not moping around. I am not doing nothing," I protested, my mind jumpstarted from its usual torpor. "I have a job, I have school and all my homework, and the house." I stared pointedly at his plate, still filled with the toast and eggs that I'd made for him.

"Wrong word," he conceded. "You are not doing nothing. But you are … lifeless. I just want you to not be miserable. I think you'll have a better chance if you get out of Forks." I knew what he was leaving unsaid for now: I want you away from memories of _that boy_, that boy who made you run away to Phoenix and break your leg, that boy who left and never called or sent letters or gave any indication that he knew you still existed.

"I'm not leaving," I muttered. The last thing I wanted was to go to Jacksonville. The last thing I wanted was my mother's constant questions, her inevitable attempts to make me "talk it out," to try to be my best friend, the role in my life she was most comfortable with. While Charlie's worry hung heavy in the air between us, it wasn't his natural inclination to pry. He was a small-town cop – when he broke up the party at Tyler Crowley's parentally unsupervised house, he didn't ask who had brought the liquor. His goal was to keep the peace.

Today, he was venturing way out of his comfort zone. "Why not?" he demanded.

"I'm in my last semester of school – it would screw everything up."

"You're a good student. You'll … figure everything out," he said, his assurance fading a bit at the end.

That gave me my opportunity. "Yes, I'm a good student, and I want to go to Udub, and we'll be able to swing that only if I can pay in-state tuition," I pointed out. "If I go to Jacksonville, I won't be a resident of Washington. I won't even be counted as a resident of Florida, so I'd have to wait a year to start college there, and even so, Washington's better than University of Florida. " I wasn't playing fair – I wasn't sure I had all my facts right, but Charlie wouldn't be able to tell if I was wrong.

It worked. Charlie sat speechless, obviously trying to come up with a rebuttal. But what was he going to say? "Sure, no problem, I can pay $24,000 a year instead of $7,000"? I took advantage of his silence to dump my uneaten cereal and grab my school bag.

"Speaking of school, I need to get there. I have a calculus test," I said. "See you tonight."

* * *

><p>The next Saturday, I used my break at work to drive over to Forks Federal Bank to deposit my paycheck. Not for the first time, I cursed the Newtons' apparent inability to put me on direct deposit and the bank's apparent reluctance to have an outside ATM. For there was, as every time I deposited my minimum wages into my meager account, Mrs. Stanley at the teller's window.<p>

"Good afternoon, Bella," Jessica's mother greeted me.

"Hello, Mrs. Stanley," I said with reflexive politeness despite her openly appraising stare. Yeah, yeah, I knew what she was thinking – after all, I was the ex-associate of the mysteriously disappeared town freaks, the zombie daughter of the police chief's wife who bolted. I slapped my deposit slip on the orange-trimmed brown laminate counter, startling her from her survey of my purple-shadowed eyes. "Time to put in my huge paycheck."

"Tell me about it," she said conspiratorially, her stiff curls bobbing with her nod. I might look like a rather unattractive vampire, but she and I could share the lament of the American working class. She started pecking at the keys of her computer terminal; I dug the toe of my right shoe into the bank's gray carpeting.

"Huh." Mrs. Stanley's exclamation was abnormally high-pitched, and an unwonted curiosity stirred.

"Is something wrong?" I asked. I couldn't imagine that the Newtons were trying to pass bad checks; their business was too good, and my paycheck too paltry.

"No, no, " she mumbled quickly before looking up at me with some sort of ill-concealed excitement. "Would you like a printout of your recent deposits?"

I was about to say no, but her almost visibly vibrating body made me change my mind. "Sure," I said. Mrs. Stanley hit a key, and the printer spit out a sheet of paper.

I stared at it in shock. Instead of the $1,500 and change that I expected, my account balance was listed as $21,036.50. A deposit of $20,000 made three weeks ago was nestled among the monotonous entries of Newton paychecks. It was a wire transfer, with no name attached.

I raised my head to see Mrs. Stanley's eager eyes. However this turned out, mistake or deliberate, innocent or criminal, it would be fodder for conversation at the Stanley dinner table and Shear Madness and the Thriftway. But I had to ask. "Could you tell me more about where this comes from?" I said, pointing at the anomalous entry.

Jessica's mother looked down at her monitor again. "Well, it's from another bank, " she said.

_Thank you, Mrs. Stanley, for that brilliant insight._

"But from whom?" I persisted.

"I'll have to ask Charlotte … Charlotte, are you busy?" she called out. Charlotte Gerandy walked out from the manager's office in the back and after greeting me, leaned down to peer over Mrs. Stanley's shoulder. The two murmured together for a few minutes.

"Sorry about this, Bella, " Mrs. Gerandy eventually said. "I'll need to make a phone call to track this down."

Fifteen irritating minutes later, Mrs. Gerandy called me into her office. As I sat in front of her desk, and Mrs. Stanley, I knew, lurked on the other side of the closed door, she told me all about my unexpected and thrilling scholarship from the Pacific Northwest Trust. The $20,000 down, $5,000 a month till "the end of your college career," no-strings-attached, J. Nicholls Scholarship. Paid directly into the account of a girl who wasn't at the top of her class even in tiny Forks, Wash. Mrs. Gerandy, looking increasingly perplexed, gave me the contacts of the scholarship "administrator" and ineffectually tried to answer my expressions of disbelief – and something more.

For the first time in four months, I felt an emotion other than desolation.

It was anger.

That _bastard._

* * *

><p>I spent the rest of my afternoon at work fuming, enough of my anger showing on my face that Mike Newton looked at me in astonishment when I returned from the bank, and then made sure to give me a wide berth.<p>

There were no restrictions on the money, Mrs. Gerandy had told me, though the intent was clear: _Be a good girl, go to school._ But there were other possible interpretations, and they assailed me as I showed customers backpacks and fishing poles, ran credit cards and made change. _You can't find me, but my lawyer will keep tabs on you. I'll be able to forget about you, but you'll remember me every time you pay a bill. _

That _controlling _bastard.

Then, as I waited outside the dressing room to hand a woman a larger size in hiking pants, even worse occurred to me: _This will guarantee your silence._ That thought made me nauseated.

My stomach was roiling still as I made dinner for Charlie, boiling water and sautéing bacon for amatriciana sauce. My father, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, looked up at me, startled by the racket as I banged pots and pans with unnecessary force. For months, I realized, I had been noiseless - except when I should have been, in my sleep.

By the time I cleared away Charlie's empty plate and my full one, a tiny bit of my anger had been replaced by determination. I had to plan.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Probably every fic author has an urge to rewrite the end of "New Moon," but I've never see a story using the outtake as a starting point, so I hope this isn't too tiresomely familiar. Thanks for reading!_


	2. Chapter 2

_Disclaimer: Stephanie Meyer's stuff isn't mine._

Chapter 2

_Be a good girl, go to school. Be a good girl, go to school. _The words wrapped around the new ball of anger and rejection in my chest like a loop of tape, a constant muttering soundtrack that spurred me on.

On Monday, I gave thanks to Bill and Melinda Gates for granting Forks High broadband with their magic foundation wands made of rolled-up billion-dollar bills, since my Sunday with my dial-up service had resulted in many desk thumps and curses. I skipped lunch to monopolize a library computer.

After school, I phoned Mrs. Newton from my house, then drove to Port Angeles to open an account at a bank whose tellers didn't know me and who would therefore have no reason to discuss my transactions with their teenage daughters. I went to a cell phone dealer and left empty-handed, and went to the non-New Agey bookstore and left with a heavy bag. Charlie saw it when I walked into the house, and his face brightened at this evidence that I was reading again, though he said nothing.

He didn't know that the books I had bought weren't novels.

On Tuesday, Mike approached me as I was pulling my name tag out of the drawer under the cash register. "Bella, Mom says you gave notice?" he asked, his voice squeaking slightly. "Why?"

I looked down at my shirt as I put on the name tag, careful not to prick myself. "I need to do something else," I mumbled, then looked up at him to see the hurt on his face. "Um, would you mind not telling anyone yet?"

He was silent a moment, and the expression on his face hardened. "That will be difficult since we have to replace you," he said, his voice now cold, his annoyed tone a perfect echo of his mother's the day before. His irritation was plain even hours later when I used my employee's discount to buy the biggest backpack I could comfortably manage and some other supplies. Still, Mike must have been discreet, because in the days ahead nobody at school asked me why I was quitting.

Only Jessica looked at me oddly. Mrs. Stanley, you blabbermouth.

The weeks passed and envelopes came for me in the mail. After my last Saturday shift at Newton's I called my mom, and as Charlie and I were finishing up lunch at the kitchen table the next day, I steeled my nerves and sat up straight on my chair.

"Dad," I said, "you're right. I need to leave Forks."

"Huh?" He swallowed his last bite of lasagna and went on, "What? What about college tuition and all that? And, you know, you're looking better –"

"Well," I started as the phone rang, and Charlie grumbled and rose to answer it. After a minute or two of monosyllabic exchanges, he returned to the table, and said, "That was Billy. He and Jacob are coming over real soon."

"For a game?" I asked, trying to calculate whether this was a good development or not. If Charlie and Billy ganged up on me …

Charlie stared at me in mild disbelief. "More than a _game_. The Seahawks are in the Super Bowl this year, Bells."

"Oh."

"Yeah." There was an uneasy pause as he scratched the back of his neck. "So, you want to go to Florida now? "

"Um, not exactly. I'm going to Europe," I said, and flinched in anticipation.

But Charlie was not a man for explosions, just interrogations. "You're going to Europe," he said flatly. "How? With what? What about school?"

"I have plane tickets –"

"How can you afford it?" he interrupted.

"I got vouchers for plane tickets ... for my birthday," I muttered. For the hundredth time in the last two weeks, I had a flare of anger that a controlling bastard had snatched the vouchers away along with all the other evidence I had that he had existed. I really could have used them.

"Uh-huh," Charlie said, but not asking for an explanation. He doubtless knew whom they were from.

"And I've got several thousand dollars in my account, for college," I went on. I wasn't lying, I reminded myself. "And I'll get my G.E.D. when, you know, I come back." _If I come back._

"Why not get it now?" he asked.

I stood up and cleared away the plates to avoid his pained glare. "You have to wait six months after –"

"After dropping out of school."

"Yeah," I said, running water over the smeared plates in the sink and staring out the kitchen window at the solid gray sky. Charlie's chair scraped on the floor as he stood up too.

"So, let me get this straight," he said. "You're going to drop out of school, and use up your savings wandering around Europe. By yourself. Because of that boy, that -"

I turned and raised my hand to stop him. "Not because of that," I said with unintended vehemence. _Despite _that boy.

He shook his head. "We need to call your mom."

"I did, yesterday," I told him. "She thinks it's a wonderful idea." Renee had, too – "I always wanted to do that!" she had squealed, obviously not thinking beyond her own thwarted adolescent dreams – and I knew she would back me up.

"Jesus Christ. _Renee_," Charlie said in disgust, before trying another tack. "I'll worry about you. I mean, just in the last year you were in that van accident, and you broke your leg, you came back from your birthday with your arm all stitched up, and then you got lost in the – " He stopped abruptly. _And I was bitten by one vampire and nearly attacked by another and stalked by a group of rapists._

"Yeah, maybe I'd be safer if I got out of town," I muttered. "And London's got a lot less crime than Seattle."

"You may be right about that," he acknowledged, "but London? It'll be cold and gray."

I snorted. "It's warmer than here," I said. I had done my research. "And since they speak English there, it's less intimidating."

We heard the Blacks' truck pull up then, and Charlie went out to help haul Billy's wheelchair inside. Jacob gave me a brief, unexpected half-hug when he entered a few minutes later, and Billy smiled warmly at me as Charlie closed the door behind him.

"Good to see you, Bella," Billy said. "Charlie says you've got plans?"

"Uh, yeah," I answered, shooting my father a dirty look.

"It sounds great," Billy said enthusiastically, and Charlie stared at him in betrayal. "See new things, meet new people, get out of here … but for now, we've got football to watch." Billy maneuvered his chair into the living room while Charlie, Jacob and I gaped after him.

The XYs gathered in front of the television, but I stayed in the kitchen and worked half-heartedly on the calculus homework due the next day; really, what was the point? And I definitely wasn't going to write the essay on "Portrait of a Lady" that was due the day after that - Isabel Archer could go ruin herself in Europe without any interference from me, and I expected the same courtesy from her.

That meant I was easily distracted by the bursts of conversation from the living room between plays: Charlie was talking about the implausibility of hikers' reports of strangely behaving bears in the forest, while Billy seemed to find them believable.

"But it's February," Charlie protested once.

"Animals change when the weather changes, when the climate changes," Billy declared. "There have been more deer in the last few months, too."

"We've had more deer before, but not psychotic bears," Charlie grunted in disagreement.

The halftime analysis didn't hold Jacob's interest, and he wandered into the kitchen.

"I can't believe you want to travel around Europe by yourself," he said, slinging himself into Charlie's chair. His long hair swung a few times before settling on his shoulders. "I mean, it sounds kinda scary."

"I am a little scared," I admitted. _I'm also pissed_, I didn't say.

"But I get it, you know, after that guy…" he trailed off. "Yeah, so what are you most looking forward to seeing?"

"The Leaning Tower of Pisa," I said, surprising myself.

"Nah, really?"

I considered for a moment, and decided to stick with it. "Yeah, it's a cool piece of architecture. And it's something that people have tried and tried to fix, and just can't. It's kind of fascinating that way. What would you want to see?"

"The inside of a bar," he said with a smirk. "It'd be great to drink legally, not worry about getting carded."

I regarded him, assessing his height. "You know, you keep growing like you're doing, and bouncers will be too afraid to ask for your ID," I teased him.

He flexed his biceps. "Big wolf genes run in my family," he said, snorting, and I vaguely remembered the Quileute legend he had told me on the beach last year, the part I hadn't paid much attention to.

"Ah, then you can scare off those bears that Charlie and Billy keep arguing about."

"Yeah, my dad – I can't believe he approves of you going off to Europe. He'd never say that to me."

"That's because you're not middle-aged like me, wolf cub."

As we talked, I realized how comfortable it was to be with Jacob. I could hang out with him in La Push, escape my classmates' pity, make Charlie happy. _And be a good girl and stay in school and go to college with my new college fund._

No.

The Blacks left soon after the Seahawks lost, wishing me luck. Charlie stopped me as I headed upstairs.

"When are you planning to go?" he asked.

"Tuesday," I answered. "You're okay with this?"

"No," he said with a grimace. "But I've had to listen to enough family disputes as a cop to know there's no point. And I know you well enough to know that when you make a decision you stick with it."

He did know me. "So would you mind driving me to Port Angeles?" I asked. "I'll pick up the airport bus there."

"I'll take you to Sea-Tac," Charlie said. "It's the least I can do."

* * *

><p><em>Be a good girl, stay in school,<em> I repeated to myself as I stared at my nervous reflection in the plate- glass window of the Detroit airport while I waited for my connection, and then the next day as I emerged from the Tube at Notting Hill Gate. The prices for youth hostels in London had been tempting, but I feared the enforced camaraderie and the likelihood that I'd wake up my bunkmates in the middle of the night. Instead, I'd found a cheap hotel in an old town house, the grand salons cut into tiny bedrooms, a shared bathroom on the corridor. Just like home. The manager was an Indian woman who spoke with the Queen's accent and wore a light-green tunic and pants, a matching scarf around her neck. She didn't pry. I was grateful.

I called Charlie from the European-compatible cell phone that was my first purchase in London after my Tube card. And that night, for the first time in months, I had no nightmares.

The same was true for the next night, and the night after that. Navigating a new country exhausted me, and I woke up every morning with sore muscles. I spent my days in London's free museums, and my evenings in the discounted youth seats at the theaters. There seemed to always be some history play of Shakespeare's being performed in which relationships between men and women were a matter of politics, not affection, though when Richard II said goodbye to Queen Isabel - _And must we be divided? must we part?/Ay, hand from hand, my love, and heart from heart_ – I had to avert my gaze from the stage and stare at my fists until the next scene.

London was less expensive in many ways than I expected. What I found the priciest were food and transport, so I scrimped on both. That meant that I often found myself trudging along the sidewalk at times that would have terrified me in Port Angeles or Phoenix, but seemed perfectly safe here.

As I passed the pubs on the way to my hotel at night, shivering against the damp cold, I couldn't help sneering at myself sometimes. Here I was dropping out of high school, abandoning my father, being unheeding of the future, but instead of spending my money like an 18-year-old finally allowed to knock back a pint, no questions asked, I was dutifully traipsing through museums and attending plays and returning to my tiny room alone every night. I really was 35.

I was rebelling in a really responsible way.

But at least I was rebelling.

* * *

><p><em>AN: I wanted to get to an exciting part, but Mr. Price says I have to break my habit of writing excessively long chapters. Controlling bastard. Let me know what you thi_


	3. Chapter 3

_Disclaimer: "Twilight" isn't my fault. Neither is Berlusconi, thank God._

_Mr. Price is feeling a bit bruised by your comments (and that's without mentioning PenName76's offer to send me a list of divorce lawyers). I have tried to kiss him and make him better._

_The non-English stuff is explained at the bottom._

* * *

><p>Chapter 3<p>

I couldn't say what exactly was my undoing in London. I was becoming comfortable in the city; maybe I was settling into a routine that allowed feelings I'd suppressed to come back to the surface. Or maybe it was my last visit to the National Portrait Gallery. There, in Room 31, I came upon an exhibition on World War I poets, and a photograph of a beautiful man from 1913, his hair luxuriant and unruly, his jaw strong, his eyes alight with intelligence.

"The most handsome young man in England," the curator had written on the wall label about Rupert Brooke, who had perhaps dreamed of fighting in the war but died of disease instead. "An object of desire for many, men and women both. He was loved much more often than he loved." I couldn't tear my eyes away until a guard quietly told me that the museum was closing.

What I do know is that I woke up whimpering in the middle of that night, and that my cries the night afterward brought my neighbors on the corridor pounding on my door. "Quel bordel," the Frenchman from next door muttered when I apologized. As I walked downstairs to the tiny lobby in the morning, Mrs. Patel the manager was waiting, fiddling with a long paisley scarf that coordinated with her deep red tunic and matching pants.

"Miss Swan, may I speak to you a moment?" she said, her words precisely modulated. I followed her to her equally tiny office, and she motioned for me to sit. "I'm afraid you disturbed some of the other guests last night," she said, not unkindly, and I dreaded the inquisition that was sure to come. "Is this a frequent occurrence for you?"

"Yes," I admitted. "It stopped for a while but now it's started again -"

"Ah," she responded, but asked nothing else. No interrogation. We were silent a moment.

"I'll check out today," I said abruptly, and she looked relieved. It was less time than I had told her that I was staying in London, but the prospect of an empty room didn't seem to bother her.

I returned to my room to fetch my things and consider my next move. I could go to Oxford, see a college I would never be able to attend. Or to Bath, where Anne Elliott pined for her lost love in "Persuasion."

No. I would come back to England later, when it was warmer. Perhaps.

So I made the trek to St. Pancras station, where the trains for the Continent started. I could go to Amsterdam, look at van Gogh's paintings, get stoned at a coffee shop. No, I couldn't take the risk that I might say something. The thought came to me unwanted: _This will guarantee your silence._

Bastard.

Ugh. I could go to Paris – no, I wasn't ready to face the French yet. I could go to Italy now that the Olympics were over in Turin. Yes, I'd do that.

I reserved a seat on a night train to Rome, then used the guidebooks I'd bought back home and an Internet café to make arrangements for my stay there. I called my stupid new bank to warn that I was going to Italy in the hope that it wouldn't freeze my account again - Washington Mutual _so _deserved to go out of business. Mrs. Stanley might have told everyone in Forks where I was traveling and what I was buying, but at least she'd have let me have the money in my own damn account. Even if it was hush money.

I quashed the impulse to visit Room 31 in the National Portrait Gallery again.

It was nearly impossible to sleep, much less dream, on my three-leg journey to Rome, and I arrived in the city the next afternoon feeling exhausted and disheveled. My hotel this time was a few blocks from the Spanish Steps, on a quiet street in an old peach-hued stucco palazzo that had been divvied up to accommodate many families. My trek up the stairs to the fourth floor (or fifth, as Americans would count it) hinted at why I could afford a room with its own bath in such a nice neighborhood.

The owner of the Locanda del Pesco was an elderly signora with English better than my Italian who insisted on snatching my dirty clothes from me. Leaning out from my window on the courtyard, I looked down on lines of drying laundry and realized that my underwear was going to be waving around for everyone to see. Great. I could also hear some music coming from an apartment on a lower floor. "Tu mi spiazzi, ogni volta che mi guardi," someone sang in a pathetic attempt at hip-hop. Maybe _that _was why this place was so cheap.

After a shower to wash off the grime of the train, I went out to explore, wondering how I was going to fill my evenings. As I walked along the Via del Babuino, I came across a not-so-old neo-Gothic church tucked among the apartment buildings, its doors open. It wasn't the architecture that prompted me to walk in, but the name of the church, and I had the germ of an idea.

As I stepped into the sanctuary, I was hailed by a balding man wearing a clerical collar who was carrying a stack of hymnals down the aisle. He had a British accent, for this was a church for Anglophone expatriates.

"Could you recommend an Italian tutor?" I asked him, and his face brightened at my simple request. At first glance, I supposed, I looked like a runaway who was adrift in Europe and who needed fare home. And, I also supposed, the first two parts of that description were accurate. As for the third … _you'll remember me every time you pay a bill._ I tried to shove my anger down, down into the pocket that held a wad of newly acquired euros courtesy of WaMu.

I followed Father Hitchens past the brown-and-cream striped columns of the nave and into his office. Its ornate paneling was marred by a bulletin board covered in ads and announcements in English and Italian.

"Here," he said, tearing off a little rectangle from an ad bearing a name and telephone number. "I've received good reports about Miss Benzone. Her English is excellent, I'm told."

Father Hitchens sent me off with a satisfied smile and reminder that the Sunday morning service was at 10:30, with wine afterward.

Wine, really? When in Rome, I guess…

Simona Benzone's English was indeed excellent, and I met her at her comfortably book-cluttered apartment in the Trastevere neighborhood. Or, as she corrected me, her parents' apartment, in a crooked building that must have been constructed before Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel less than a mile away.

Simona had recently graduated from the big university in Rome, La Sapienza, and like most young Italians, she told me, her hands and thick dark curls bouncing furiously as she talked, she'd probably have to live with her parents until she was in her 30s, apartments being so hard to come by. A relative in the Ministry of Education had promised to get her a job teaching English at a liceo, a state high school, but until them, she was earning her keep by tutoring foreigners. She grumbled a bit about dinnertime, but we easily came to an agreement for lessons every evening.

"Per quanto tempo? For how long?" she asked, already in teaching mode as she made notes in a leather-bound calendar. She was wearing a plain black sweater and trousers, but her shoes, in a rich green suede with pearl buttons, were among the most exquisite I had ever seen. Even in a certain household in Forks.

"Three to four weeks, probably," I answered, using my stay in London as my guide. How long could I stay in Europe if my nightmares forced me to flee every capital in less than a month? "I don't have a fixed schedule."

Simona looked curious, but didn't press me. Europeans just didn't seem to press, period; in the breakfast room at the hotel in London, it was always Americans who would chatter at me, asking advice at first, but then trying to figure out why I was so far from home by myself. The best response, I had found, was saying that a friend was joining me in a few days, that we planned to enjoy Europe before starting college at Udub or Arizona State or University of Central Florida, whichever they'd be least likely to be familiar with. My questioners would have ended their stay in London before discovering I was lying.

"We will start tonight?" Simona asked, breaking my reverie. "Questa sera?"

"Questa sera," I agreed under her prompting.

Thus I started a pattern of roaming Rome by day, dodging Vespas - jeez, you had to be crazy to ride those things - and eating pizza bianca in the Campo de' Fiori, and learning Italian at night.

It was appropriate, considering how I had found her, that Simona was a godsend, a patient teacher who was able to build on my rudimentary Spanish. She was also appalled by my eating habits – I didn't know enough Italian to lie convincingly about my meals - and took to moving our lessons from her apartment to one of her neighborhood restaurants, "to make you practice Italian in a real situation," she told me, but really to make me eat. I had many permutations of pasta all'amatriciana, all of them better than what I had cooked for Charlie.

Simona also got me a job of sorts for several days as a pack animal/errand runner for a former professor of hers who was taking a group of rich Brits around the city. The Brits considered me beneath their notice except when they needed something, but that was okay with me. And in return for fetching scarves and cough drops for Mrs. Cadogan and her friends, I got a fine free education.

Professore di Giovanni often came across as a pretentious blowhard, as Simona had warned me, but I couldn't have asked for a better guide to help me understand the strata of the Forum and the genius of the oculus of the Pantheon. Even better – and what the rich Brits were really paying for – were the visits to private collections of Roman busts and Etruscan bronzes. More than once I held his purse as the professor flirted shamelessly with an elderly shrunken contessa who owned 2,000-year-old marbles of Minerva and Vesta … along with a wardrobe of beautifully constructed shoes.

And Mrs. Cadogan and her friends in their winter tweeds were old Cambridge students who were serious about antiquities and architecture. I could only hope to be as sharp-witted as they were when I got to be their age. If I got to be their age … years and years stretching out before me like the ocean from the edge of a cliff.

* * *

><p>If navigating a strange city by myself had been exhausting, navigating a strange city in a strange language demolished me. I fell asleep when my head hit the pillow, fatigue and the thick walls of my room preventing any sounds from intruding on my dreams, whatever they were. I didn't remember any when I woke up, and was grateful. Thanks to Simona and the errands I had to run at my sort-of job, my Italian improved greatly - and my landlady, Signora Buonaccorsi, told me one day when she was returning my laundry that she wouldn't speak to me in English anymore. Which was even more exhausting, but I knew it was a compliment.<p>

The weeks passed and spring came, with the magnolia trees in the Borghese Gardens budding as if they had been looking at a calendar. But my Roman holiday was too good to last.

The trigger this time was obvious: it wasn't a photograph or a painting, but a phone conversation with Charlie one night after my lesson. The bears, he told me from his office on his lunch break, had turned out to be huge wolves, huge wolves in a forest that hadn't seen such things for decades, since the Olympic wolf had gone extinct.

"And we probably wouldn't have figured it out without the fire," he said.

"There was a forest fire? This time of year?"

"No, someone set a big bonfire," he answered. "It sent up a cloud of weird purple smoke, and Mrs. Stanley called it in. Whatever it was, it stank something awful, like toxic waste or poison or something. I let the environmental protection folks know. Anyway, there were wolf tracks all around the area, maybe half a dozen or so. Really big paws."

"So these are huge wolves with opposable thumbs and Bic lighters?" I asked skeptically.

"Ha, ha, smart mouth. There were bare human footprints, too -"

"This time of year?" I asked again.

"Yep. But anyway, it means that we're not searching for fire-setting dogs. Just really big wolves. At least it shut up Billy about the bears."

"How _is_ Billy? And everyone else?"

Charlie paused for so long that I looked at the screen of my phone wondering if the call had dropped. "Billy's fine," he finally answered. "But Jacob … well, I'm little worried about him. I haven't seen much of him lately – he's been hanging out with a tough-looking bunch over in La Push, and he dropped out of school."

Crap. I hoped I hadn't been a bad influence. "Is Billy concerned?" I asked warily.

"That's the strange thing," Charlie said. "Not at all. And you know, I can't push him on it that much since … well, since you –"

"Did the same thing."

"Yeah," he mumbled. "Or not. Are you sullen and six and a half feet tall now?"

I exhaled sharply. "Jacob's gotten even taller?"

"Uh-huh. Like he's taken super growth pills."

"Well, maybe his hormones are just all screwed up now. Maybe it's all just a phase."

"Hope so." He was silent for a moment before asking: "What about you? How are you doing?"

"I'm learning a lot of Italian."

"That's not what I meant."

I sighed. "I know. I'm fine. I'm doing a lot, you know. I'm -" I gave up the pretense. "I'm the same," I went on.

"Are you lonely over there?" It was a surprisingly intimate question from Charlie.

"I miss you," I said. "But I'd be lonely anywhere. So why not do it in a city filled with history? I'm learning more here than I would in Forks High."

Charlie was silent again for a moment. "Whenever you want to come back, I'll be here," he reminded me.

"I know," I answered. "When my money runs out."

* * *

><p>That night I woke up with a harsh cry. I had been dreaming I was falling, and indeed I found myself on the very edge of the bed, about to tumble to the floor. I sat up, relieved that I hadn't awoken my neighbors this time, and images from my dream ran through my mind – bears morphing into wolves with red eyes … Jacob twisting and turning and crouching as if he were in a horror movie, becoming a wolf himself … fighting his immortal enemy. They were dream images I'd had before, after Jacob had told me the story of the cold ones.<p>

A _true_ story.

Merda, merda, merda, as Simona would say. I should go back to Forks, warn Charlie to stay out of the forest, away from wolves … away from Jacob.

I recalled Billy's approval of my decision to leave town. He had known what was really happening in the woods, it was obvious now. I had the Blacks' number on my cell phone as a way to reach Charlie, and I called it.

"Bella, what's up?" Billy asked in surprise. "Isn't it the middle of the night there?"

I ignored that. "Is Charlie in danger?" I demanded instead.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said coolly.

"Charlie told me about the giant wolves in the forest. Giant wolves that can light fires and leave human footprints. Just like in Quileute legend."

"We have many stories. In some of them, salmon talk."

"Stop it, Billy," I said, my anger flaring. "You know what I know – you haven't exactly been subtle about it. For Chrissakes, you sent Jacob to my prom to warn me away from -" I cut myself off. No. "Is Charlie in danger?" I demanded again.

Billy's tone changed from cool to glacial. "He is safe from creatures that change. It is the creatures that don't change that we all have to fear," he said. "And now they are gone."

_They are gone._ Yes, they were. They were all gone.

"Charlie is really safe from the wolves?" I asked, my throat tight.

Billy's voice softened at that. "He is, Bella. Don't worry."

Billy and I then talked, in coded language, about Jacob, and Charlie's safety, and by the end of the call I had been persuaded that I could stay in Europe. But after my dream, I couldn't say the same about staying in Rome. My reprieve was over.

* * *

><p>I didn't want to leave without saying goodbye to Simona, though.<p>

It was a dinner night for us. I said nothing while the trattoria owner kissed Simona's cheeks, then did the same to me, to my discomfort, and Simona told me what she wanted me to order for her. Zucchini blossoms, and fettuccine alla Romana, which had tasted delicious when Simona made me try it before, but which I now knew had livers and giblets in it.

"I'm leaving tomorrow," I announced after our host deposited a carafe of red wine on our table and left. These weeks of dining with Simona had greatly increased my tolerance for alcohol, so I wasn't worried about saying too much after a glass or two.

"Why are -" she started, then reconsidered. "That's unfortunate. Professor di Giovanni has another group of - what is the word? - ah, well-heeled ladies from Britain coming for a tour. Maybe one will adopt you." I rolled my eyes at her, and she sighed and went on, "It's too bad you're American – I'm sure I could find you a little job here otherwise, a legitimate one that pays."

I shrugged, and didn't disabuse her of her assumption that I was out of money.

"Where will you go next?" she asked.

"Naples," I said, pouring wine for the two of us. I could visit the ruins at Pompeii and Herculaneum, be by the sea for a few days...

She wrinkled her nose and shook her head emphatically. "You don't want to go to Naples. "

"I don't?"

She bent down and pulled out something from the leather bag she had set down next to what even I could tell were extremely elegant brown suede boots. Sitting back up, she unfolded a copy of La Repubblica and handed it to me. "Try to figure out what the headline says," she said.

_Berlusconi, nuovo scandalo sessuale,_ I read on the front page. "A new sex scandal for Berlusconi? What does that -"

"You don't need to know any Italian to figure that out," she interrupted me in disgust. She had made her dislike of the Italian prime minister abundantly clear in our lessons. "This one," she said, tapping her finger on a headline farther down the page.

_Ancora tensione a Napoli, rifiuti in strada, traffico in tilt,_ it said. "What words do you know?" Simona asked.

"Naples," I said.

She made what was probably a rude gesture at me, and I went on, "Umm, tension again, street, traffic. What's 'tilt'?"

Simona rocked her body side to side on her chair as if she was about to fall off. "Like when you break a pinball machine by shaking it, I think. Crazy, haywire. But the important word is rifiuti." She paused for effect. "_Garbage_. There is garbage piled on the street up to your neck. Nobody is picking it up."

"Crap. Maybe I'll go north then. I want to go to Florence, Pisa …" I said, remembering my conversation with Jacob … pre-wolf Jacob.

Simona nodded. "It is more expensive in the north, but if you go now, maybe less crowded?" The rest of dinner passed with Simona giving me advice on my further travels in Italy, in English for ease of conversation. When we finished our crostata di ricotta for dessert, the owner came by and casually plunked a bottle of limoncello on our table. I eyed it dubiously. I might be able to handle a glass of wine, but that stuff would not guarantee my silence.

"I will miss you," Simona said with a small smile.

"I'll miss you too," I said back. And I would. It had been pleasant to hang out with someone who didn't see me as the girl left behind, the girl who couldn't get over it. I had never been someone who had a gaggle of friends, but I was sorry that I couldn't really be friends with Simona, that I could never really be friends with anyone again.

"Thanks so much for everything," I said in place of what I couldn't.

* * *

><p>To put off going to bed and enduring the nightmare that would follow, I crossed the Tiber and walked a while before finding a taxi to take me to the main train station so I could buy my ticket for the next day. I was feeling smug about my ability to negotiate the ticket machine, the biglietteria self-service, until I realized that I had bought a ticket for the wrong train. Instead of the express to Florence, I was on a local that made a dozen stops.<p>

Merda. I'd have to go to the ticket window to get an exchange, and there was a long line there, long enough to make me suspect that I'd be better off spending an extra two hours on the train instead. Besides, I'd save 20 euros on the slow route.

My dreams that night were even more violent than before, and the thick walls of my room weren't enough to save me from waking up the whole floor. Signora Buonaccorsi took my keys from me frostily in the morning, and bid me goodbye in English, in a sign of my fall from her grace.

I settled into a window seat on my train, and sent Simona a text – "SMS me!" she had ordered me, her fingers stabbing at an imaginary keyboard. An hour later, the train was sitting in the nondescript station of Orte, the brakes hissing as if we were in for a long stay. An announcement over the intercom – a strike? a track problem? I couldn't tell - had my fellow passengers grumbling and retrieving their things, and I followed them off the train.

A line of buses waited in front of the station, and a railway employee tried to direct us to the right ones. "Last bus, straight to Florence," she barked between bursts of Italian and waving at the other buses that were making intermediate stops. The other non-Italian speakers and I dutifully trudged to the last bus.

"Florence, Florencia, Florenz," its driver said in a monotone, leaning against the side, his hands in the pockets of his blue uniform pants. I heaved my big backpack on the overhead luggage rack and found another window seat, near the rear. I was soon joined by a very large middle-aged American man in a T-shirt with cartoon gladiators on it, his flesh overflowing into my space.

From my window I could see the gray hair of our driver as he followed someone around the corner of a garage, and sighed in annoyance at the delay. I got out my guidebook from the messenger bag I had kept with me, ignoring the babble of languages around me.

"Ladies and gentlemen," a chillingly beautiful voice suddenly rang out. A woman's voice. It came from the center of the bus, but I couldn't see the speaker from my seat.

"I will be your driver to Florence today. I'll try to get you to our destination as fast as I can, so hold on," she purred. "Please turn off your cell phones and store them in your luggage as they interfere with the bus's systems."

While I struggled frantically to get to my feet in the limited space I had, my seatmate staring slack-jawed and immobile up the aisle, I heard electronic notes and pings - the passengers obediently silencing their lifelines with the outside world. I grabbed onto the seat in front of me to keep my balance as my eyes searched out what my brain was screaming at me.

Our driver was no longer a bored, olive-skinned, older man, but a stunning young woman. Her mahogany hair curled gracefully over the shoulders of her blue uniform shirt, her pale skin glowed in the dim interior of the bus … her perfect features a rebuke to mere mortals.

Her dazzling smile faded slightly as she noticed me staring at her with what was surely obvious horror on my face. She finished her announcement,and spun abruptly on her heel. It seemed like just a second later that we were hurtling out of the station plaza.

My legs could no longer hold me up, and I dropped back into my seat to try to marshal my thoughts. I didn't know what to do, I didn't know what to say, but I knew this: We were a polyglot group of cattle headed to slaughter.

* * *

><p>AN:

_Thank you to Camilla10 for fixing the Italian (and some English!) here._

_The song Bella hears is "Svegliarsi la Mattina" by Zero Assoluto (lyrics: "You catch me off guard every time you look at me.") It's not as bad as Bella suggests. But then I also think liver in my pasta sauce = yummy._

"_Quel bordel" – what a fucking mess._

"_Merda" - shit_

_Florencia is the Spanish version of Florence, Florenz the German. _

_My apologies to any former WaMu employees. It used to be my bank, and I had no unpleasant dealings with anyone there, but I couldn't resist._

_On the list of things I think are unlikely: that a few dozen foreign tourists could disappear in Italy at the same time and nobody would notice. But, hey, if it worked for SMeyer …. _

_I am contributing to Project Team Beta's Smut University (hmm, why did they think I was qualified?). My topic will be hot tub sex and other bad ideas. if you have a water sex story, I'd love to hear it! (You can PM me). THe list of essays is at Projectteambeta (dot) com / smut-university /_

_There's a link to pictures of the most handsome young man in England on my profile page._

_And let me know what you think!_


	4. Chapter 4

_Disclaimer: I don't own "Twilight." Or apparently the ability to write while on vacation. Sorry._

_But Camilla10 does have the ability to fix my Italian, which she kindly did. If it's not translated in the text, it is at the end._

* * *

><p>Chapter 4<p>

Maybe it wasn't true, but I'd read somewhere that people who've been hit once by lightning are more likely to be struck again. There was even some park ranger who got knocked over by lightning seven times … before killing himself over unrequited love.

Apparently, vampires were my lightning. I was a damned lightning rod for vampires.

And there was nothing more I wanted than to get off this bus and avoid being bit by lightning again.

So what was I going to do about it? What _could_ I do about it? When the bus made a stop, could I jump from my window? No - the emergency lever to open it was in the row in front of me; I'd never get out before someone, vampire or human, snatched me back. Could I call the police? It would be the same scenario - either the driver or a human in her power would stop me before I could explain in my faltering Italian, or even rapid English, what was happening.

Think, think, _think_. What did this vampire want with us? Surely she didn't intend to drain us all herself – surely she was going to share us with the other members of her coven? It would have to be an awfully big coven, and a half-remembered thought niggled before my mind raced on, to an idea inspired by my birthday-party fiasco. Vampires could multi-task, I was well aware of that, but if the driver's freaky powers of enthrallment were somehow broken, could she handle both the bus and 40 panicked passengers? She could stop and kill us all in this enclosed space, surely, but what good would that do her?

I stood up again. "I think I'm on the wrong bus," I told my seatmate. After a great deal of maneuvering and grunting, I was able to push past him and into the aisle.

He regarded me with mild irritation as I rummaged in my backpack on the rack above to retrieve the Swiss army knife I had bought at Newton's, trying to angle my body to hide what I was doing from the driver. I slipped the knife in my jacket pocket and made my way toward the front. The bus sped up even more as it veered onto the autostrada, and I lurched as I walked.

The aisle seat in the row just behind the driver was unoccupied because the woman sitting by the window had put her bags there. I glared at her without bothering to speak, since she was wearing headphones, and she reluctantly moved her belongings off the seat, muttering in German.

I watched the surface of the autostrada race by for several minutes, ignoring the hostility emanating from my neighbor. The driver smiled beguilingly at me in the wide mirror above the steering wheel that helped her to keep track of what her passengers were up to, then frowned once more when I didn't smile back.

"I know you're not human," I murmured almost inaudibly, knowing that if I was right, she would hear me. Unnaturally violet eyes shot up again to meet mine. _Busted,_ I thought. It was an adjective that could apply to both her and me. I raised my right wrist briefly to my hairline as if to wipe away perspiration or scratch an itch. My scar from James's bite would be obvious to her, even if it hadn't been to the humans in my life.

"In the next town, stop the bus and tell everyone to get off, or I will stand up and announce what you really are," I whispered.

She rolled her blue-on-red eyes. "Nobody will believe you," she said softly, and almost carelessly.

"They will when I cut my arm open with my knife," I hissed, and she couldn't hide her reaction: her hands clawed on the steering wheel, and the bus jerked as her foot pushed the accelerator to the floor. "I'm told that my blood is irresistible," I went on maliciously. I slowly drew my finger down the side of my neck, and her eyes followed the movement, transfixed.

_Busted,_ I thought again.

And again it applied to both of us.

I raised the back of my other wrist to my forehead so she could see the knife in my palm.

"Fine, have it your way, crazy girl," the driver said, waving her hand negligently. "Return to your seat." She seemed almost cheerful, making me suspicious. I stared at her, and she added, "I will do it – but you stay on with me. I'm giving up 42, you see, so I should get to keep one."

I hadn't expected her to let me go. But I had hoped. I was human, after all.

I gave her a curt nod, trying to control the trembling that threatened to expose my terror at what would happen when I was alone with her, and stumbled back to my row. My seatmate looked at me curiously. One of the cartoon gladiators on his T-shirt had blood spurting from his chest, I noticed now.

"What'd she say?" he asked.

"I'm definitely on the wrong bus," I told him.

* * *

><p>She might have been an amoral, bloodthirsty vampire, but the driver had not lied to me. Ten minutes after I returned to my seat, she turned off the autostrada and announced as she drove on the local road, in her lovely Italian-accented English: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have excellent news: the trains are returning to service and you'll be able to complete your journey by rail. I strongly suggest that before you go into the station, you take the opportunity to ride the funicular -" she pulled to a stop at the tramway's entrance, steps away from the train station - "up to the magnificent old city of Orvieto."<p>

It _was_ magnificent, I could see from my window, a collection of medieval buildings gathered atop a cliff high above the railroad. Nature chose then to send a beam of sun through the blanket of clouds, coloring the stones of the houses and churches ochre, as if to taunt me with a beauty I'd never have an opportunity to explore.

I watched with a mixture of relief and fear as the other passengers gathered their gear and stepped off the bus. "Enjoy your afternoon in Orvieto. The Rete Ferroviaria Italiana thank you for your patience," she purred at them as they descended the stairs; dazed, they mumbled goodbyes in return. Under her spell, my seatmate barely spared me a glance as he left.

As soon as the door slammed shut behind the last departing passenger, the driver stomped on the accelerator and we left with a screech. The abandoned travelers had queued up obediently at the funicular entrance with their bags, and I wondered how long their enchantment would persist. Enough, I hoped, to make us untraceable; as much as I wanted to be saved from this bus ride, I didn't favor the chances of any of Charlie's Italian counterparts against my captor.

Once we returned to the autostrada, she called back to me: "Come join me, crazy girl. Bring your luggage." With dread I hauled my stuff to the front, dumping my backpack on the seat behind the driver and sitting down across the aisle. It was a tiny bit farther from the predator. Not that it would make any difference.

"Give me your passport," she ordered, and I pulled it out of my bag and handed it to her with the tips of my fingers. Her seductive Italian accent had disappeared, and now she sounded like ... me? It was disconcerting, and creepy in its ordinariness. "Isabella Swan of Washington," she murmured.

"Bella," I said automatically, stupidly.

"How unsuitable," she said, but I was in no condition to feel hurt by her insult. She tossed the passport back to me, no longer interested.

"What happened to our real driver?" I couldn't help asking.

"Aperitivo," she drawled, making me shrink back into my seat. Her answer wasn't entirely unexpected, but the nonchalance in which she said it was chilling.

She turned and looked at me curiously. "Why do I frighten you?" she asked.

My mouth opened and closed soundlessly before I could formulate a response. "Are you joking?" I spluttered. "You're a –"

She waved her hand dismissively. I wished she'd keep both hands on the wheel. I wished she'd look at the road instead of terrifying me. "I don't frighten humans," she said. "I lure them, and they follow me, like the sheep they are."

"Maybe my mind doesn't work right," I muttered.

"You're a freak," she agreed, seeming to find some satisfaction in this, and turned away.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"We?" she snorted. "_I_ am taking _you_ to Volterra."

"Volterra?" I repeated, and dug into my bag for my guidebook. The name seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn't picture it.

"Between Siena and Pisa," the driver said, not very helpfully. I finally found it, a pinprick on the map seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but indeed, not far as the crow flies from Pisa. Whose Leaning Tower I would also never see.

"What's in Volterra?" I asked. She hesitated, seeming to contemplate whether to tell me anything more.

"My masters," she said finally. Not coven, but masters? "My masters will want to ask you who bit you and punish him."

"Why?" I said, astonished. "I mean, why would they care that a human was bitten?"

"They care not because you were bitten, but because you were left alive."

"That's wrong?" I squeaked.

"It's wrong because he left you knowing too much," she said as if that should be obvious to me.

_Oh, no._ "What if I don't want to say? Who bit me, I mean."

The driver seemed to find this amusing. "You won't be able to help yourself once you meet Aro," she said smugly.

Memories slid around in my mind like pieces of those puzzles where you have to figure how to move the tiles so things will be in the right order. Aro. Aro and Volterra. Aro of Aro, Marcus, Caius of the Volturi. Of Volterra. Where I was going to show up as a problem to be solved. Or dispatched.

"_You don't irritate the Volturi,"_ I had been told. _"Unless you want to die."_ I hastily bowed my head and pretended to be absorbed in my guidebook to hide my realization. Not only was my own demise approaching, I had to figure out how to protect the family that had confided in me. How could I keep myself from telling Aro? Would he torture me as James had? I whimpered a bit, and I thought I saw the driver smile.

As we drove on, the map told me that the countryside had changed from Umbria to Tuscany. I stared numbly at brown and light-green farm fields and darker green hills, at rows of slender cypresses leading to orange-tiled roofs. The bus left the autostrada at some place called Bettole, speeding along a twisting road heading west and higher in ridges of the Apennines. The driver gloried in taking the turns at the highest speed possible, and while I knew she was infallible, I wasn't so sure about the bus. But then, maybe tumbling to my death down a slope into a spill of rocks would be preferable to whatever was awaiting me at this journey's end.

We skirted Siena - it was famous for its centuries-old horse race, my guidebook told me – and after changing roads several times, finally ended up on a gravel path winding among a deserted evergreen forest. The driver yanked the wheel to the right, and threaded an impossible way through the pines. When the bus stopped, the road was hidden, and so were we.

"Come," the driver ordered. "Bring your things."

Not sure that I'd ever need any of the items in it again, I hefted my knapsack onto my back and followed her off the bus.

* * *

><p>The driver jabbed with lightning speed at a keypad, entering an impossibly long series of numbers with one hand as her other hand gripped coldly at my wrist. I would have complained if I wasn't so stupefied by our long, stumbling walk through a pitch-black cave full of puddles and then through an equally dark passageway of rough stone. I was grateful for the faint light seeping in around the wooden door in front of us.<p>

The driver's fingers stopped moving and it opened with a click.

Walking through the doorway was like stepping from the 13th century into the 21st. Or maybe the 20th, since the bland corporate furnishings that greeted me looked as if they were from a 1980's office park. But that wasn't the most striking thing I saw.

A woman had leapt to standing behind a reception desk, deep-red roses in a silver vase the only object on its surface. A beautiful human woman. I goggled at her as the driver pulled me further inside.

"Signora Heidi!" the woman gushed as I dropped my gear on the floor."Buon pomeriggio!"

Without acknowledging her greeting, the driver – her name was really Heidi? How _unsuitable_ - started issuing what seemed to be a stream of orders in Italian, so fast I could catch only a few disturbing phrases: _i padroni _(the masters); _ragazza pazza_ (crazy girl - that was me); and most ominously, _consumare_ and _bere_ (consume and … drink).

"Volentieri, Signora Heidi," the human said, and walked rapidly, her heels clicking, down a hallway that turned abruptly so she was out of view.

"Where's she going? " I asked.

"I wanted to warn my masters that I'm not bringing quite the refreshments they were expecting. I wouldn't want you to be drained before I had a chance to explain your unusual circumstances," she said casually.

"But… but," I said, my stomach rebelling, "won't they attack _her_?"

"Possibly," Heidi said, shrugging.

The human woman returned a few minutes later, her dress askew, looking flushed and … excited? I looked at her in shock, but then figured I'd better worry about myself right now.

She nodded at Heidi, who yanked at my wrist and dragged me past the human without a word, my luggage abandoned on the floor. We made the same abrupt turn in the hallway to meet a double set of wood-inlaid doors. Once again we stepped into another century.

"Room" wasn't really the right word for it. Chamber? Audience hall? The walls were more rough stone, enclosing a circular area and rising up into a dome. It was like a barbaric version of the Pantheon, cold and damp, with all the brutality inherent in the design but none of the civility.

As in the Pantheon, an oculus at the apex of the dome provided air and light, and a grille was in the stone floor below. In the Pantheon, the grille covered a drainage hole to carry off the rain water that fell in. Here, I couldn't help but imagine the grille being lifted to unceremoniously send exsanguinated bodies down a chute to some ossuary or oven.

The oculus had the effect of obscuring the figures - some in cloaks, some not - along the walls of the round chamber and illuminating the three in the center, ensconced in massive throne-like armchairs in a wood so dark with age that the carvings were impossible for a human to discern. Aro, Caius and Marcus, I assumed, all dressed in black clothes that only emphasized their pallor.

The silence in the chamber was so complete that I could hear the fall of my sneakers as I walked gracelessly on the stone floor. The figure in the middle chair of the three arose as we approached.

"Aro," Heidi said reverently, and extended her fingers. Aro touched them with his for a second and then turned his red-eyed gaze at me. His skin was a shocking contrast to his jet-black hair.

"Isabella Bella Swan of Washington," he said, and a titter spread among the figures in the penumbra. Aro wasn't asking a question, so I didn't answer, but how the hell did he know? He seized my hand, and it took everything I had not to cringe away from him; his fingers felt like eroded rock. He no doubt smelled my spike of adrenaline, but he didn't look as if he was getting off on my fear, as James did. He looked puzzled instead.

"Has anyone ever told you that you're hard to read?" he asked. His question set off a round of murmuring among the vampires in the shadows.

_Yes._ "What - what do you mean?" I stuttered.

"Tell me about the individual who marked you," he said instead, turning over my hand so he could examine the scar on my wrist. His touch was so cold.

"I met him in the forest," I said, trying desperately to remember the story I had constructed on the bus as Heidi drove. "I was separated from my friends. He talked about my scent and that I had been too easy to capture –"

"He was an inefficient braggart," Aro cut in disapprovingly. His precise consonants reminded me of the accent of Mrs. Patel, my London landlady.

"Um," I hesitated, not sure how to respond to this.

"Did he give you his name amid this superfluous exposition?"

"No," I said. It was the truth, and besides, I didn't want anyone tracking the Cullens down through my story.

Aro waved his hand impatiently. "Go on."

"He bit my wrist," I said, wincing still at the recollection. "It burned." Almost the worst pain I'd ever felt, I thought.

While Aro's face was impassive, I could hear more murmurs – of agreement, I thought - from the darkness. "But then my friends found me and the man disappeared," I continued. "One of them sucked at my wrist –" Aro looked dubious and I tried to explain "- you know, like for a snake bite, you suck the poison out? Anyway, it made the pain go away, and I was all right. Except for the scar," I pointed out unnecessarily. "But nobody seems to notice."

My voice sounded unconvincing even to me, although what I was saying was true. More or less.

"Truly?" he said skeptically. "And what did you tell your family and friends about your encounter?"

"I didn't. I mean, I told them I didn't remember anything."

"Truly?" he repeated with an increased degree of skepticism.

"Yes," I said more resolutely, happy to be on firmer ground. "I live in America, not, uh ...Transylvania. I didn't want to end up in a mental hospital." _Leave Charlie alone,_ I chanted to myself as if I could will it. _Leave Renee alone. Leave Angela alone. Leave frigging Lauren Mallory alone._

Aro contemplated me a moment. "You are a terrible liar," he said finally. "Jane?" Heidi hastily stepped away from me.

A short robed figure glided from the shadow circle. It was a girl, a brunette younger than me, frozen in the throes of puberty. I would have felt sorry for her were it not for the angelically malicious smile she directed at me. As I looked at her, bewildered and immobilized by the viciousness of her red eyes, another murmur arose from the ring of vampires.

"Sorry, my dear Jane," Aro told the girl as she stamped a tiny foot, though he didn't sound sorry at all. She stepped back into the shadows, an equally short figure drawing her into an embrace.

"What shall we do with you?" Aro's voice startled me with its sudden closeness. A hiss came from the white-haired man seated in the right-hand chair. "Caius thinks we should kill you. Or would you rather join us?" he asked, as cheerfully as if he were giving me a choice between dry toast and waffles for brunch. "You would have immortality, and a pleasant lifestyle that you will adjust to easily." Now he was offering me maple syrup as an inducement for waffles. He ignored another angry hiss from Caius.

I stared at Aro a moment. _A pleasant lifestyle._ "Couldn't you just let me go?" I blurted out, my voice squeaking. "I promise I won't say –"

"That was not an option I offered," he said, his voice abruptly cold.

"Does it matter what I want?" I whispered.

"No." He looked impatient again.

As I had been so often reminded, I was a weak human, and I was weak enough to have a very primal reaction: I wanted to live, no matter in what form. But when I opened my mouth, I couldn't make the words come out, the words that would give me a continued eternity of loneliness, of numbness. Of all the emotions that may have been playing on the faces of the figures in the shadows, I suspected that none of them was happiness.

"I don't want to be one of you -" I started.

Aro, however, was no longer looking at me, but over my head, behind me. "Gianna," he barked, and I felt a breeze as he went past. The human woman was just inside the door, and as soon as he touched her hand he hissed an order that made Heidi capture my wrist again.

She dragged me around the Volturi thrones and through a door behind them. I felt like a child's pull toy, perhaps a sad plastic dachshund with floppy vinyl ears. In seconds we were in a new hallway, one provided with light by a row of small high windows that nobody could look in on.

"I really need to pee," I bleated desperately. Nothing like imminent death to make your bladder go haywire.

Heidi exhaled with exasperation. "I'll take you to the human's rooms," she whispered. "Now shut it."

Around the curve of the corridor and up a stone spiral staircase, we came to a room with another high, barred window and a four-poster bed hung with red draperies. Gianna's suite, obviously: there was a kitchen with a table and a solitary chair through one doorway off the main room, a bathroom through another. Jewelry was scattered on a vanity, several of them gold necklaces reading, "Gianna," as if she needed to remind the vampires of her name.

Handcuffs were hanging on one of the bedposts. They puzzled me. They had to lock up Gianna at night? That seemed … unnecessary.

"Go," Heidi told me impatiently as I gazed at them, pointing to the bathroom.

When I came out, she had exchanged her bus driver's uniform for a dark purple dress that molded to her figure. It made it even easier for me to imagine her as the bait for a band of highwaymen in the Carpathian Mountains centuries ago, luring hapless travelers to dark corners where their purses - or their throats - could be cut.

"What's going on?" I asked as she looked in the vanity mirror in evident satisfaction.

"Visitors," she answered lightly. "Perhaps Aro was afraid they would try to eat you."

"Would he care?" I asked.

"Yes, indeed," she said, laughing now. "He finds you … interesting."

"Huh." I frowned as something occurred to me. "Is he angry that you let all the passengers go?"

"Aro's not, but some of the others are complaining. Because you –" she spun around and moved closer to me "—you ruined some weeks of planning."

"I can't say I'm sorry," I said. Her proximity disturbed me and I stepped back so the bed was between her and me.

"No matter, I'll just load up the bus with immigrants from one of the encampments around Cecina. Easy pickings," she said casually, then laughed again when she saw my dismay. Had my actions merely exchanged the lives of well-off Western tourists for those of poor Africans?

"Don't fret, crazy girl," Heidi told me. "You delay us drinking for a day, after a few centuries that adds up to saving a few dozen entrees. Ah," she said, cocking her head in an oddly human movement. "We're being summoned back. Are you ready for the end?" She didn't wait for my response. In a flash, she snatched my wrist and led me out of Gianna's room. I was a pull toy again.

* * *

><p>I didn't see the speaker, but I heard the voice, and it was enough to stop me cold behind Aro's chair.<p>

"Of course we know she's here, Caius, her scent is –" the voice cut off, and Heidi pulled me more forcefully around the set of thrones, and into the sightlines of three familiar vampires. Two looked worried, one looked –

Oh, I couldn't bear to see. I swayed on my feet, and the closest one grabbed me before I could fall. Cold and hard as it was, his was the most comforting touch I had felt in months.

"Bella, you are all right?" I looked into Carlisle Cullen's golden eyes, and managed to nod once. "We'll take care of you, sweetheart. Just bear with us a few moments," he told me, and set me securely on my feet, his arm wrapped around my waist.

"Thank you," I croaked. "I can't believe you're here."

"I see, Isabella, that you're a better liar than I suspected," Aro said dryly from his chair, interrupting our reunion. I stared at him blankly before realizing he was demanding a response, an apology.

"Everything I told you was true," I protested shakily. Aro looked unimpressed.

"But full of omissions," he complained.

"What is more important, what shall we do with Carlisle's human pet?" Caius said the last two words with particular disdain, but at least he was now giving me the courtesy of speaking at a pace and in a language that I could understand. "She knows too much, even more than we thought at first –" he looked pointedly at Carlisle "—and that situation cannot persist. You must change her or kill her. "

"Yes, Carlisle," Aro urged him, leaning forward. "Tell us you'll change her, as you changed your new children here." His eyes flickered to the other two visitors.

"No." The hoarse voice behind me was not Carlisle's.

"Your son seems opposed to the idea, Carlisle," Caius said, his glee obvious. But I could barely hear him over the roaring in my ears. The ball of rejection in my chest burned; once more I was being told I wasn't worth keeping. Carlisle's arm tightened around me.

"It's not my decision, but Bella's," said Carlisle, his calm voice belying the tension I felt in his arm.

"She's already made it," Caius snapped at him. "She told us she didn't want to be one of us. Therefore –" he rose from his chair like a snake ready to strike "—there's only one option. To spare your sensitive conscience, I'll do it."

"No!" A new voice rang out. Alice moved directly in front of Aro. Next to him, she looked even smaller and more delicate in her thin dress than I remembered. "Her decision here doesn't matter. I promise you, Bella will join us. I can see it."

"Promises are worthless," Caius snarled.

Alice didn't answer, but like Heidi, put her fingers on Aro's hand. He closed his eyes. He appeared almost … euphoric. I looked up at Carlisle in confusion.

"He can read her mind when she touches him," he explained to me. Suddenly several questions were answered, but not these: _did someone decide to change me? Did you? Did Alice?_ Carlisle's face held no answers.

When Alice stepped back, Aro's eyes flew open and he clapped his hands like an excited child, the sound reverberating off the dome. Caius's lip curled. Even Marcus, so far a silent participant in the conversation, looked mildly curious.

"That is marvelous, Alice, just fascinating," Aro cooed. "Carlisle, you neglected to tell us how you came across such gifts! A psychic, an empath, a telepath … I'm positively envious." Carlisle inclined his head but didn't reply.

"And the girl?" Caius demanded.

"Isabella will be greatly improved as a vampire," Aro answered, prompting another titter from the shadowed vampires. Though I'd bet not Jane. "And what Alice has shown me of your life, Carlisle, of the life of this family you have created since you left us, is extraordinary. Albeit unnatural."

"It suits us," Carlisle said blandly.

"Unnatural enough," Aro continued as if Carlisle hadn't spoken, and pointing at me, "that your son did not take what was due him from his singer, but left her to wander about the world by herself. He has been perverse in his abstinence." Aro turned to Caius, eager to share his gossip. "She clings to Carlisle, but is not his pet. She is his son's. His shameful obsession."

There was growling behind me, and Carlisle hastily said, "Perhaps we could discuss this another time, Aro. But now that you've been reassured on Bella's future, I beg you grant us leave. This is not the most … relaxing environment for a human."

"I'm disappointed that you're departing so quickly," Aro said. Caius hissed at him again, back at vampire speed.

"Bella will be with us, so that you need not worry about that," Carlisle said.

Caius looked only somewhat mollified. "You are free to go … for now," he declared, a threat palpable in his tone. "But we will be watching – and we do get impatient."

Aro, by contrast, looked ebullient. "I'm so looking forward to seeing just how well Isabella turns out," he burbled as Carlisle guided me out of the chamber of horrors, skirting the abominable grate that I had once been destined for.

* * *

><p>The four of us had just made it to Gianna's desk when a "Wait!" stopped us. It was Heidi, carrying my backpack and bag. Carlisle took them from her, and I was grateful not to have to get close enough to her to retrieve them myself.<p>

"Thank you," he said, but Heidi looked at me curiously. What did she want, for me to thank her for not killing me? I reluctantly nodded at her in acknowledgment.

"Goodbye for now, Isabella," she purred. "I'm sure we'll meet again, one way or another."

* * *

><p>As we wended our way through the maze of hallways in the Volturi complex, my relief at being alive ebbed, to be replaced by … humiliation. Once again I had demonstrated that I was a helpless, stupid human. Once again the Cullens had been forced to come to my rescue. Only this time, they'd had been compelled by guilt to leave the new lives they had created for themselves to save me from a group of vampires whom Carlisle had obviously avoided for a century.<p>

_You can't find me but my lawyer will keep tabs on you._ I should have made that _… but the occasional annoying vision of Alice's will tell us if you're behaving._

The floor changed from stone to industrial carpet to new marble; the Volturi chambers were hidden behind the façade of a modern office building. I stared at my feet as we walked, clutching Carlisle, too demoralized to follow the conversation whistling around me. The three others were talking about what had just happened, much of which I still didn't understand, but I couldn't bring myself focus on their words.

It wasn't until we had exited the office building and walked through a dark alley to a piazza that I started to pay attention.

"It would be wise to get out of here as quickly as possible, " Carlisle said, and two male voices started discussing airports and routes to Seattle. Alice did not join them.

"I'm not going home," I mumbled, bringing their discussion to a halt.

In the silence that followed, I could hear a burst of laughter from a bar behind us, a church bell tolling, the splashing of a fountain in the center of the piazza, the flapping of a piece of faded red cloth tied around a pillar. A clock tower to our right said it was five.

I lifted my head and forced myself to look squarely at _that boy_, the man who had abandoned me, who lied to me and thought I needed to be paid off so I'd keep quiet. He looked as if he hadn't hunted in a while, but otherwise he appeared just the same as he did the day he left - unaffected and unmarked by the months that had passed ... unattainable.

"There's nothing for me back there," I said more clearly.

"Bella -"

"No." I cut him off. I refused to hear the rest: _"Bella, don't be absurd" or "Bella, you don't know what you're saying."_

I dragged my gaze to Carlisle."Would you mind taking me to a town, a different town, with a train station?" I asked him. "I need to get to Florence."

"Of course," he said instantly. "Alice, would you -" he continued, but she had gone. The three of us stood in the piazza in an uneasy silence until Carlisle's phone vibrated and he led me a few streets away to where Alice waited.

"Sorry, that's what I found," she said apologetically, gesturing at a nondescript beige sedan. Its engine was almost as loud as my truck, but it was running and the doors were unlocked. I slipped into the passenger seat and slammed the door behind me, Carlisle already next to me with one hand on the gearshift.

"Are you sure?" he asked quietly. I nodded, and he shifted into drive.

A pair of hands landed heavily on the trunk, shaking the car. As Carlisle sped off, I twisted around and stared through the rear window at a pair of figures, copper-haired and black-haired, the tall one wrapped by the arms of the smaller one, until we turned a sharp corner and they disappeared.

I burst into tears then, sobs of relief, of exhaustion, of mortification … of loss.

* * *

><p><em>AN: _

_Some Italian:_

_Aperitivo: aperitif, before-dinner drink._

_Rete Ferroviaria Italiana : the Italian railway system._

_Buon pomeriggio: Good afternoon._

_Volentieri: willingly._

_The park ranger story is true, poor guy. Also, I wanted to say that Aro sounded like Tony Blair, but "The Queen" (with Michael Sheen as a terrific Blair) didn't come out until later in 2006, so Bella wouldn't know that._

_Mr. Price read this and had no idea what was going on. I just patted his hand sympathetically. He hasn't read the books. It would be tedious to be more explicit for all of you who have read them, I think. But let me know if I'm wrong. Fyi, there will be some "superfluous exposition" in the next chapter._

_I've started a new project as well: a translation of a lovely story in French, "The Eyes of the Moon." Check it out on my list of stories and send Elysabeth some love._

_Thanks for reading!_


	5. Chapter 5

_Disclaimer: I don't own "Twilight" or that goofy-looking movie coming out next month that I'll probably watch an embarrassing number of times._

_Grazie to Camilla10 for the Italian; translations at the end._

* * *

><p>Chapter 5:<p>

I had cried before, of course. But for the first time since that horrible day in September, there was some sense of relief in crying, as if acid and bitterness were being washed away with my tears. I had seen the man who didn't want me one more time, and as much as it had hurt, it had also eased the pain in my chest - the incontrovertible proof that he still existed in this world was a sort of comfort.

Carlisle said nothing beyond telling me that he was going to drive me straight to Florence, just rubbing my shoulder in between shifting gears, fishing out a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and handing it to me. And perhaps my feelings had something to do with his soothing presence next to me. I felt abandoned by my best friend, rejected and betrayed by the love of my life, but I had just plain missed Carlisle. Even knowing that the Cullens felt they needed to give me hush money hadn't kept me from missing him.

We headed east, then north, through the hills and forests of northern Tuscany. The sky had remained gray while I was in the Volturi lair, and the day slipped almost imperceptibly into night without a sunset to provide evidence of the minutes passing. When my sobs eased a bit, Carlisle pulled over onto the shoulder of an empty stretch of road.

"I'll be just a minute," he told me as he opened his door. "I need to perform some cosmetic surgery." I was baffled a moment until I heard him open the trunk. A few thumps and protests by metal later, and he was back in the driver's seat.

"Was the operation successful?" I asked.

"No," he said, annoyed. "The fist imprints are only slightly less obvious." He slid a wad of euros into the pocket of the driver's side visor before restarting the engine.

"Do you have a place to stay in Florence?" he asked a little while later, after passing through one of the villages that were becoming more frequent as we neared the city.

"Yeah, but - " I hesitated.

"But?"

"Florence seems awfully close to Volterra," I observed. I didn't say it, but besides being scared, I didn't want Carlisle to leave me so soon.

He looked contemplative. "I am confident that Caius will give you some time before doing anything, but I can understand your concern, " he said.

I thought for a moment. "I think I'll go to Venice. It's pretty far away, right?"

"Farther than Florence, yes." He paused, then said, "I take it you've had enough of trains and buses today?"

"Definitely."

"I'd be delighted to drive you there," he said, and I could tell it he meant it.

"I'd like that."

"Good," he said with evident satisfaction. In fact, he seemed ... relieved?

He pulled out his phone then, and looked briefly at the screen. "We're all set," he said. _Alice_, I realized. "We'll change to a more legal car in Florence," he added, then grinned in a way that reminded me that by some measures he wasn't much older than I was. "It's rather hot in here, don't you think?"

I snorted at his bad joke, and he looked pleased at my reaction.

Carlisle somehow found a parking spot on a street not far from the Ponte Vecchio where we could ditch the car without attracting notice. We walked between the stalls lining the old bridge over the river that bisected Florence and into the maze of tourist-choked streets in the city center.

I had forgotten: everyone stared. For the past several months I had been practically invisible, but Carlisle, slinging my backpack over his suited shoulder with the aplomb of a model on the catwalk in Milan, made passers-by gawk, then look at me in puzzlement. I ducked my head, my cheeks burning in the brisk air, and Carlisle wrapped his arm around my waist, guiding me as he had in Volterra, as naturally and comfortably as if he embraced humans every day.

I fended off Carlisle's urgings that I eat something to ward off shock - that ran in the family, I guess - before we picked up a rental car at an agency near the train station. I gazed at the black-and-white striped arcade of the Santa Maria Novella church - would the Volturi give me the chance to see the Botticelli fresco inside one day? - while "Signor Lo Bianco" filled out the paperwork for the sporty Audi we were renting.

Heh. Mr. White Guy.

Even with Carlisle by my side, I was uneasy in Florence, and breathed a sigh of relief as we sped north out of the city. Carlisle, too, seemed more relaxed, and I noticed how much more pleasure he seemed to take in driving the Audi than the stolen sedan.

"You're a car fiend like everyone else, aren't you?" I said, finally able to tease him a little.

"Guilty," he acknowledged. "Cars represent freedom for me, perhaps even more so than the rest of my family. Picture trying to pass as human and moving around when you can't ride in a hackney or a coach without setting the horses to flight. When I couldn't take boats, I had to walk. That's probably why there are stories about us being bats or flying - people caught us dashing across the countryside in desperation just to get somewhere."

"What about trains?"

"They are better than horses, but there is always the danger of sun shining in the windows, or on the platform. And you are still trapped inside with all the humans... When cars appeared, I was transported, if you'll excuse the pun."

We moved on then, carefully, to the less painful topics we needed to cover. I told him about what I'd seen and done in London and Rome, about Charlie, about Simona and Professor di Giovanni.

I left out the screaming.

He talked about Rosalie and Emmett's own travels in Europe, about the house Esme was renovating while Carlisle was teaching at Cornell and Jasper was taking classes there. For the recent spring break, he told me, he and Esme had gone to Denali to hunt and visit their vegetarian sort-of cousins.

He left out the distractions that his other son had been enjoying.

And I didn't ask.

Instead, I said, "Only you would take a vacation from Ithaca by going to Alaska."

"I'm certain you're right," he agreed and smiled fondly, I think at a memory from his stay there. It must be torture for him to be away from Esme, I realized, and I felt guilty.

Our surroundings were becoming more industrial; we could see the lights of the sprawl around Bologna, and the traffic got heavier.

"Do you think you might be ready to eat?" Carlisle asked, and I nodded. For the first time in a long time, I actually felt hungry.

He looked at his phone again, and I had to snicker.

"Do you guys ever do anything without checking with Alice?" I asked.

"Honestly?" he said. "No."

Alice directed us to a busy, unpretentious restaurant near one of the ominous medieval towers that dotted central Bologna. Most people sat at communal tables, but we were led to a table for two along one wall. As Carlisle pulled out my chair for me, I realized that Alice had probably chosen this place less for the food than for the acoustics: I would be able to hear Carlisle, but nobody else would.

When the waiter brought by a plate of mortadella and a carafe of sangiovese, Carlisle poured for both of us, and gamely lifted his glass to his lips. A flash of disgust crossed his face as he made contact with the dark red wine.

"So appealing to look at, so appalling to taste," he said ruefully.

I took a big sip from my own glass, figuring I might need some liquid courage for the conversation ahead. "It's actually quite good," I reported.

The waiter returned to ask what we wanted from the menu on the blackboard opposite us, and Carlisle started to order for me. I felt a surge of irritation - did he think that after weeks in Italy, I couldn't manage in a restaurant by myself?

"Excuse me," I interrupted and turned to the waiter. "Vorrei le tagliatelle al ragù." After all, I was in the home of Bolognese sauce. "E le verdure miste."

"Nulla per me, grazie," Carlisle said, and the waiter looked surprised, but shrugged.

"My apologies," Carlisle said after the waiter left. "I spent many years in a culture where the man ordered for the lady, so it's reflexive for me."

Oh. I had misinterpreted his motives, I realized, and now I felt churlish. "No, I'm sorry," I said. "I should have guessed that."

We were silent a moment. I took a bite of mortadella and another swig of wine before Carlisle spoke again.

"I might be asking for your forgiveness again for my next question," he said, looking pre-emptively apologetic. "How is it that you're traveling in Italy? How can you … afford it? Are you using your college savings?"

I dropped my eyes to the table. I felt childish, resentful, embarrassed. After my months of numbness, feeling so many emotions in one day was exhausting. "Well, no, I'm using your money," I mumbled.

"Our money? What money?" He seemed genuinely surprised.

"The fake scholarship money, of course." Now I felt angry again. "Why - why did you feel I needed to be bribed? Did you really believe I would say anything about -"

"We didn't," he interrupted me. "Why do you think it was us?"

"Why else would I get an unsolicited and extraordinarily generous scholarship from some outfit called the Pacific Northwest Trust?"

Carlisle sighed. "Yes, that's us. I hadn't known he had done that. When was this?"

"The money just appeared in my account - poof! - in January." Simona had rubbed off on me – I was flinging my hands up for emphasis.

"Bella, we never would have thought you needed to be bribed," Carlisle said. "I'm certain he didn't think that either. But –"

"It seems a reasonable interpretation."

Carlisle lined up his cutlery, an unusual display of fidgeting for him. "For all his time on this earth, and for all he knows about human nature because of his gift ... he doesn't seem to be able to transfer that knowledge to you. I'm sorry. I'm sure that he wanted only, desperately, to make your life easier."

"He wanted to control me," I said bitterly.

Carlisle shook his head. "Do you really think that?"

"What was I supposed to think, Carlisle? He was always telling me that we were wrong together, that I shouldn't be part of his life, that I should limit myself to all the conventional human experiences. Like college. It was his vision for me." I was ranting, and I had to pause to catch my breath. "And I decided it didn't have to be mine."

"I imagine that dropping out of school and traveling across Europe certainly wasn't his vision for you," Carlisle said wryly, and I gave him a small smile.

"Now that I know you didn't have anything to do with it, I'm glad I decided not to put all the money in a box and throw it through the window of your house in Forks. But I have to admit I did consider it," I said, and finished the last bit of mortadella.

"Thank you for restraining yourself."

We paused as the waiter came by to clear my plate.

"And thank you for saving me today," I said when he left, suddenly aware that I had shamefully failed to express my gratitude. "Can I assume that Alice saw me taking the bus to oblivion?"

"Yes," Carlisle said simply.

"How did you get to me so fast?"

His answer surprised me. "We were already on our way to Italy, thank God."

"You were? Why?" I asked bluntly.

My harsh tone troubled him, I could see. "We were back in Ithaca, as I said, when our prodigal son returned - "

"Returned?"

"He hadn't been with us, Bella. He'd been gone for months – he even refused to talk to us." I looked at Carlisle in confusion. Maybe his son was a controlling bastard, but I couldn't imagine him being cold to his family. "We were so worried about him."

"You were?" I asked again, trying to figure out why Carlisle now seemed reproachful. "Wasn't he just off enjoying his distractions, doing whatever he it was that couldn't do in Forks?" _With me,_ I added silently.

Carlisle shook his head. I definitely wasn't imagining the reproach. "He was unhappy after you sent him away -" he started.

My jaw dropped just as it had earlier that day in the bus with Heidi, when she asked me why I was afraid of her. "_He_ broke up with _me_!" I interrupted Carlisle, too loudly, but a round of laughter from two 50-something couples at a table near us masked my own volume. Even as I said it, I knew it wasn't quite right: he hadn't just broken up with me, he had eviscerated me, torn out my heart in the way he knew would be the cruelest. The hot ball of rejection moved from my chest into my throat.

"What?" Carlisle looked astonished.

"He told me -" I took a deep breath to steady myself so I could do my damnedest not to cry "—that the birthday party showed that it wouldn't work for us, that I was no good for him, that he was tired of pretending to be something he wasn't –"

"And you believed him. You didn't try to stop him." Carlisle's voice was low and angry, and my eyes dropped to my nearly empty glass. I'd never seen Carlisle be angry before, and it was intimidating.

"Why wouldn't I believe him?" I whispered. "What could I say to him to persuade him to stay? It didn't make sense for him to want me. And everything he said to me the day he left did."

We were silent as the waiter arrived with my dishes, and asked the usual questions about cheese and pepper, and refilled my glass. When he left, I took another swig and jabbed viciously at my tagliatelle.

"You all _moved_," I muttered. "Without a goodbye."

"He told us you had agreed that the incident with Jasper had proved that it was best for us to go," Carlisle said.

"You believed him?" I asked incredulously.

"_You_ believed him," he replied quietly. "I do not defend him, but from what you've told me, he would have felt some justification for leaving."

"What?" I barked, dropping my fork, a flare of anger in my chest.

"Bella, my son saw you as beautiful, kind, smart and above all, brave. Strong."

"No, I'm weak and ordinary and a torment to be with," I whispered.

Carlisle sighed and went on, "I know what he thought of you, and how he felt he didn't deserve you. When you gave up, it would have confirmed his belief that you would do fine without him -"

I started to object, and Carlisle raised his palm in a signal to stop. "Again, I do not defend him. But because of the way he saw you, he did not consider that your response was a result of your own … insecurities."

"That's just plain shitty, Carlisle," I said, unable to help myself. "It's blaming the victim here."

"No," he corrected me. "We are both to blame. You believed him because you don't feel equal to him, and we believed him because we saw your comfort with us as such a gift, something that could be snatched away from us."

"That's ridiculous," I protested, then realized something. "You believed him. That's why you were relieved that I agreed to let you take me to Venice."

He nodded.

But I was even more furious now. Not only was the man a controlling bastard, he was a lying asshole. "Carlisle, I _hate_ that you thought I was scared of you," I said. "I never was. I never would be."

"I can see that," Carlisle said. He reached over and lightly touched my hand curled around the stem of my glass. "I'm sorry to have thought that about you."

I picked up my fork again, but not with any great desire. The ragù was probably delicious to anyone else, but to me it all tasted like regret and recrimination. I took a sip of wine instead. "Can you explain to me what happened today?" I asked. "I don't understand everything that went on in Volterra. And I still don't know why you were coming to Italy."

He gazed pointedly at my pasta. "I'll make you a deal. You eat and I'll talk."

"I've heard that before," I complained, but I obediently twirled some tagliatelle around my fork. "Well?" I asked, when Carlisle seemed at a loss.

"I'm trying to decide where to start."

"Can I ask you something selfish?" I said, putting my fork down again. "Had Alice been watching my future before the bus vision?" I didn't ask my real question: _Didn't you know how much I was suffering? _

"It was curious," Carlisle said thoughtfully. "He told Alice not to look for you, so she didn't. It's not something she can completely control, though. She sometimes sees events involuntarily. But Alice didn't see anything about you for many months – you must not have been making any decisions." I nodded, believing that. I had operated on automatic pilot for a long time. "It wasn't until near the end of January that she saw anything, but by then he was gone –"

"I still don't understand why he left you."

"He couldn't endure being with us. Esme begged him to stay, but he was in agony." Carlisle shook his head, seemingly at the memory, but I couldn't get my mind around that idea. "It wasn't until just yesterday that he returned to us, to ask Alice's help in finding you."

"What?"

Carlisle misunderstood my confusion. "He went to Forks, first, but nobody there seemed to know where you were, and he can't read Charlie very well –"

"No, no, why? Why would he look for me?"

"He couldn't bear to be away from you any longer," Carlisle said, as if it was obvious.

But I shook my head. I knew Carlisle wouldn't lie to me, but I just couldn't believe him. "He went to Forks. To look for me," I said flatly.

"Yes. And now I understand why he broke into the Forks bank to see if he could trace your movements that way," Carlisle said. "He couldn't. Even Sharon Stanley, the biggest snoop in town, didn't know."

"I opened an account in Port Angeles."

"Ah," he said smoothly. "In any case, he couldn't stay long because, well - I think you're aware that some of the Quileute are uneasy about us, and they were angry about the way we left you, so they confronted him -"

His careful language was pointless; I knew what Carlisle was hiding from me.

"You mean the wolves confronted him," I said. Billy's comment about all the vampires being gone took on a new meaning in this context. Had the wolves forced him to leave? Surely a vampire had nothing to fear from a wolf, especially one who was actually a human …

Carlisle looked at me in alarm. "You know about the wolves?"

I nodded, and bit into a pleasantly bitter vegetable that I didn't recognize.

"Good Lord, is there anything you don't know? Have you actually seen them?"

"No," I answered, wondering why Carlisle seemed so worried. "Would that be bad?"

"Yes. They are very strong. And volatile."

"Really?"

"Indeed, they can be dangerous to us. They killed Laurent."

"What the hell?" I said in shock after swallowing painfully. "Laurent? Laurent was in Forks? I thought he had gone to Denali."

"He had done that, but he was gone by the time Esme and I were there. We don't know why he was in Forks. He didn't attack anyone, from what we've seen, but the wolves took exception to his presence anyway."

"The big bonfire," I whispered, and Carlisle looked at me sharply, then with resignation. "Charlie told me there was a big bonfire in the forest," I explained, "with wolf prints around it."

"Yes, that's how he met his end, from what they were recounting in their minds," Carlisle said.

"They didn't hurt – " I couldn't finish my question, but Carlisle had long since figured out that I was unable to say the name.

"No, as you saw, he's in one piece, though they could have if they had wanted." Carlisle exhaled. "We've pledged to keep the secret of the wolves. Fortunately, Alice has enough experience with Edward to mentally compartmentalize what she wants to keep hidden. But you can imagine, if Aro knew about the wolves, he would make an effort to eradicate them."

"Oh, no," I said, imagining with horror Aro lurking near La Push … near Charlie's house. "The Volturi in Forks would be awful."

"Oh, yes," he said grimly. "Eat," he reminded me.

I picked up my fork again.

"That brings us back to Ithaca. My son called asking for help in finding you. Alice had seen your decisions to go to London and Rome. You briefly decided to go to Naples? Then Florence?" I nodded in confirmation. "It was quickest to fly to Rome. It was when we were approaching the Fiumicino airport that she saw you in Volterra." He grimaced. "His reaction in the plane – we were fortunate not to be detained by the carabinieri.

"Alice did not see a good outcome if all of us went to Volterra, so Jasper and Esme went to Rome. In fact the best combination was just she and I, but …" he trailed off.

"But?" I pressed him.

"He insisted on going as well. Caius derived entirely too much pleasure from his distress." Carlisle's eyes tightened before he continued. "You should know, we all would have swept into Volterra demanding your release, but that would have alarmed Aro and fueled his possessiveness."

Carlisle then described their trip at breakneck speed from Fiumicino, accompanied by a telepathic and psychic narrative of my changing destinies.

"That must have been -" _annoying_, I was about to say.

"Alarming, yes. I have to agree with my family – only you could find a vampire bus driver."

"Hey!" I complained. "Forty-two other people found a vampire bus driver too. They just don't know it."

"It was brave, what you did, confronting Heidi," he said more seriously.

"No," I said, remembering how terrified I was. "If I had done nothing, I would have died."

"You might have anyway."

It took me a second to understand the import of that. "Oh, so Heidi was going to kill me," I said.

"Apparently."

"She was sure then that she could drain me without causing a riot on the bus?"

"Her gift is very strong, yes."

"I don't know why she didn't, then."

"Heidi calculated that Aro would be more enthralled with you than with … dinner. And she was spectacularly right. He discovered not only a promising future vampire, but two gifted vampires he was unaware of and can now track."

And that was my fault. "I guess you hadn't been on each other's Christmas letter lists?" I said, wincing. "Sorry."

Carlisle shook his head. "No, Bella, you are not to blame for Aro's acquisitiveness. He would have found out about the new members of my family eventually."

"Eventually, as in a couple of centuries?"

"Perhaps," he acknowledged. "But something useful did come out of this visit – besides finding you, of course." He smiled briefly. "Watching Aro's reaction to Alice's thoughts, I have a surer sense of how covetous he is … I wouldn't have believed it otherwise. We wouldn't have known how much to be on our guard."

"And now I have a deadline," I pointed out. "Whom did Alice see changing me?" _I know who it wasn't_, I thought.

"Aro. He's determined that you'll be one of them."

"So, when he offered me a choice between death and changing, it wasn't really a choice."

"Aro finds you too remarkable to kill. Well," Carlisle amended, "permanently."

"I don't get it. He seemed to think I was a tiresomely ordinary human."

"You really don't understand everything that went on, do you?"

I shook my head.

"Aro speculates that you could be a valuable defensive weapon. First, you were impervious to Heidi's lures. That intrigued Aro right away. Then there's Jane."

"The tweener?" I asked, recalling the maliciously smiling brown-haired girl.

Carlisle was surprised into a chuckle. "Yes, the thousand-year old tweener." He immediately sobered. "She is vicious. I've seen her in action. With just a look, she can make her victims think they're experiencing excruciating pain. And she enjoys it."

"Ugh. I can see why Heidi didn't want to stand next to me when Jane gave me the evil eye."

"Yes. Fortunately, Jane's gift doesn't work on you." Carlisle pinched the bridge of his nose in a familiar gesture. "Also fortunately, we were just inside the castle then and unlikely to attract public attention with our reaction to Aro's nasty little experiment on you. And then there's Aro himself. Remember, I told you that he can read thoughts with a touch, right?"

I nodded.

"More specifically, he can read every thought one has ever had. But what happened when he touched your hand?"

"He asked me if anyone had ever said I was hard to read, and asked me about James. What's weird in retrospect is that he should have known about you guys –" I stopped in realization.

"Exactly. His gift doesn't work on you. Which reminds me that I should thank you."

"Really? For what?"

"For keeping our secret. For not telling the Volturi about us. Aro and Caius were quite astonished when we demanded that they produce you."

"Of course, but it was a wasted effort, like with the bus," I said, going on to describe to him my conversation with Heidi in Gianna's bedroom. "What was the point?"

"But it's not wasted," Carlisle said. "Forty-two people are alive today because of you."

"And 42 other people will be dead tomorrow."

"Not because of you, but because of the Volturi," he said. He discreetly poured some of his wine into my empty glass. "Drink. It always makes me feel better."

I rolled my eyes in acknowledgement, and he went on: "Is what I do as a doctor a waste? I can make people more comfortable. I can even prolong their lives. But I can't save them forever. I've treated countless patients. The vast majority of them are now dead, and the rest will be dead at some point."

"Except four," I reminded him.

"Yes. And perhaps five?" He looked at me with a question. "I thought changing was something you wanted."

I laughed without humor. "An afternoon spent with the Volturi puts the prospect of eternity in a different light," I said.

"I can see that. But, Bella, if it's your decision, I would change you." His voice was earnest. "Your choices are, in effect, as limited as those of Esme or Emmett were. Just the timeline is different."

I smiled at him sadly. His words would have thrilled me, once. "Thank you, Carlisle, that really means a lot to me, that you would do that." I laid my fork and knife across my half-empty dish to signal that I was finished. I was tired of eating, and this conversation was like being on a rollercoaster that never ended.

But I had one more question. "What was Caius complaining about before we left? You had to reassure him that I'd be with you."

"He was worried, probably rightly so, that Demetri wouldn't be able to find you – Demetri is their own tracker, even more talented than James," he said in answer to the confusion on my face. "Demetri can track me, for example, from anywhere in the world. But Caius fears that his methods won't work on you."

"So you're like my … electronic ankle bracelet?"

"In a sense, yes," he agreed before the waiter came to clear my plate and ask if we wanted salad or dessert. We both refused.

The check came, and I tapped Carlisle on the wrist as he reached to take it. "Let me get this," I said. "You're paying for it anyway."

He flinched, but nodded as I counted out euros from my controlling-bastard account.

* * *

><p>"What are you going to do now?" Carlisle asked me as we walked in the dark, narrow street, empty of pedestrians now, toward the rented Audi.<p>

I knew he wasn't asking me what my plans were for Venice.

I shrugged in frustration and anger. "He left me, Carlisle, and was pretty fucking convincing about not wanting anything to do with me, and showed up because he had to save me _once again_," I said. "What should I do? What should I believe?"

If Carlisle was offended by my language, he didn't show it. "It's obvious he lied to you," he said, opening the passenger door of the Audi for me.

"But he's here now," he added gently. "So the question is, which time? What is the truth? It may be that your answer says more about you than about him."

* * *

><p><em>AN: Well, I thought I'd get to whatshisname in this chapter, but Bella and Carlisle got too chatty. Next time._

_Translations: "I would like the tagliatelle with bolognese sauce. And the mixed vegetables." _

"_Nothing for me, thanks."_

_Thanks to shinzonx and inagail and arabella's and all of you who recc'd this on ADF. You make my day! _

_And a reminder: I'm translating Elysabeth's wonderful story "The Eyes of the Moon," a retelling of Midnight Sun with an Edward who's more canon than canon (if that makes sense – SMeyer sometimes tells differently than she shows) and a Bella with a difference from canon that makes her more canonical in some ways. It's on my profile page._

_MR. PRICE ADDS: I have been wronged!_


	6. Chapter 6

_Disclaimer: I don't own "Twilight," but I do hope Smeyer tries to get better CGI in Part II. And maybe subtitles for the wolves? Because the wolf voices are just goofy._

_Some interesting reactions to Chapter 5! As for me, I think everyone involved has some justification for his or her actions (though certainly some have more justification than others). Since some of you have asked: __you can find the outtake that this takes off from on SMeyer's website, in her NM section. _

_Thanks to Camilla10, who is splendida and meravigliosa, according to Google Translate._

* * *

><p>Chapter 6:<p>

The evening's wine and the day's emotional whiplashes put me under as we drove on the autostrada north, the lights of the highway flashing into the car, cellos and pianos softly playing on Radio Tre. It wasn't a deep sleep - I didn't dream about blood-stained grates or red-eyed lures or tiny girls with nasty dispositions – nor was it enough to refresh me.

"Where are we? " I mumbled when Carlisle seemed to have pulled to a stop.

"Venice," he answered.

"It looks like a parking garage," I said, squinting into the dimness.

"It's a _Venetian_ parking garage. Can't you tell?"

I huffed, but I actually could tell once I got out: the sounds and peculiar smell of the water were pervasive as I followed Carlisle, yawning, out of the garage and along a walkway that ended at a narrow canal, the Rio Novo. Carlisle's skin gleamed in the bright lights along the waterway; the low-slung train station was visible a short distance away.

A wooden launch awaited "Signor Platt" at a floating jetty, and Carlisle took advantage of the boatman's distraction in stowing my backpack and starting the engine to lift me with unnatural ease safely onto the boat deck.

The launch puttered through the Rio Novo, then gained speed after we rounded another big parking lot and glided into a much wider canal, its banks glowing ribbons under the dark sky. Our hotel, Carlisle told me, was on the tip of a part of Venice called Giudecca, distant from the tourist heart of the city, but, I discovered as we pulled to a stop at a huge peach stucco building, it had an unobstructed view of the Piazza San Marco and the Doge's Palace.

The alertness I gained from the boat ride dissipated as we followed various hotel employees through gardens and salons with elaborate moldings and remarkably ugly mirrors to our room. Our suite, rather. I muttered a good night to Carlisle, stripped, and collapsed onto the bed. I fell asleep to the sound of Carlisle's indecipherable murmurs into his cell phone in the other room; he was talking to Esme, I think. His voice accompanied me into confused dreams of an ethereal red-haired boy who gazed at me impassively. I heard melodic syllables that ebbed and flowed like the water outside my window, sometimes slapping angrily against the stone banks, sometimes gently lapping. I chased their meaning but couldn't grasp it.

When I awoke, it was quiet save for seagulls and the occasional boat engine. I washed my face and went into the sitting room to see Carlisle at a small marble table next to a ceiling-high window, a room service cart at hand. He looked crisp and polished, even in yesterday's suit. I felt like a troll with red-rimmed eyes.

"Good morning," he said, tilting his head toward the cart. "Your breakfast just arrived."

"Thanks," I muttered, dropping into a chair opposite him and glancing out the window. "My God," I said. The view was even better in daytime, this hazy gray day notwithstanding: the water of St. Mark's Basin, the sober bell tower in the famous square on the other side, the beautiful, peeling palazzi stretching along the Grand Canal.

"It is quite a sight," Carlisle agreed. "And it hasn't changed much - though there are many more motorboats and many fewer Venetians than the first time I came here."

"Were there_ any_ motorboats the first time you came here?"

"No," he said, smiling. "Just gondolas."

I turned to my breakfast. There were the usual Italian rolls and chocolate, but also scrambled eggs and corn flakes, which I devoured. It wasn't as good as home, but I had been away long enough to miss American-style breakfasts, and so it was good enough. As I ate, Carlisle politely ignored me and read La Repubblica – the front page was even more difficult to decipher than usual, since Berlusconi was running for re-election and all the articles were political.

"What are your plans?" I asked Carlisle when I'd swallowed the last of the eggs.

He folded the newspaper and placed it on the table in front of him.

"I'm meeting Esme, Jasper and Alice today at the Milan airport and we're flying back to the States," he said. "I assume you still don't want to return to Forks?"

I nodded. As long as I could keep a safe distance from the Volturi, I wasn't going to let them chase me back home.

"I have an open-ended reservation here – " he waved at the room around us "- so you can stay as long as you like."

"Oh," I said numbly. I could understand his eagerness to rejoin Esme, but I hadn't expected him to leave so quickly.

"May I see your cell phone?" he asked as I stayed silent.

"Sure," I answered, mystified. "It's in my bag."

In a few seconds, he had retrieved my phone and punched a series of numbers into it. "Any time you need any of us, you call," he said. "We will always be available for you. You are part of our family, no matter what. We won't disappear again, now that we know better."

He handed the cell to me so I could see the new additions to my contacts list: His name was there, as was Esme's, Alice's, Jasper's and Emmett's ... even Rosalie's. One name was missing, and I looked up at Carlisle. Had he not listed it out of deference to my feelings, or those of his son?

"He doesn't have a phone at the moment," Carlisle understood part of my mute question. "It broke when he was in Forks. He, um, pulverized it, in fact, when he couldn't find you."

Yeah, I bet he was pissed when he discovered that I wasn't dutifully finishing up high school. But his annoyance was less important than the more urgent question I had for Carlisle: "How is this going to work? You had to promise Caius that you'd be with me. Won't he be unhappy?" And when Caius ain't happy, ain't nobody happy, I imagined.

"I did promise. But it's your choice whether you want to be with us. Nor do I consider myself obliged to shadow you across Europe. Besides, the Volturi are rather capricious about the promises they honor. It was remarkable what Aro and Caius revealed in their thoughts before they realized there was another telepath in their midst." He raised his hand at my look of worry. "Again, you're safe for now. Aro and Caius are at an impasse about your fate, which means that Alice sees them staying put and leaving the timing in our - that is, your - hands."

He hesitated a moment before continuing, flicking the edges of the newspaper with his fingertips. "And in any case, you won't be alone."

"Oh," I said again. I realized then that he had left off a name in his earlier list, of those he was meeting in Milan. "He's here."

Carlisle nodded.

"He was here last night," I realized. I wasn't sure if I was relieved or disappointed that I hadn't known that at the time.

"With Alice, yes," he said, his face becoming sterner. "We all had a ... good talk." Now I understood the angry noises that I had heard in my dreams had come from Carlisle and Alice, not the water.

"And he's not going back with the rest of you?"

"No," Carlisle said, looking at me speculatively. I turned away from his gaze and stared, unseeing, at the glorious view as he continued, "The two of you need to work this out on your own."

* * *

><p>By the time I showered and dressed, Carlisle was ready to go.<p>

"Remember what I told you," he said at the door as we hugged each other goodbye.

"That I can call you anytime, or that it's my fault that I got dumped?" I asked. Despite the harshness of my words, my anger at him over the whole blaming-the-victim thing had mostly dissipated. I could see his point. Sort of. A little bit. But that didn't make what had happened right. And it didn't make it hurt less.

Carlisle was handsome even when he was scowling at me. "The first part, yes. I never said the second part. Nor is it true. You belong together." He sighed, and his scowl became more a thoughtful frown. "Or rather, he belongs to you. You might decide you don't belong to him."

"Because I'm a fickle human?"

"No. Because you have the power to fall out of love with someone," he answered. "We don't have that choice. "

I leaned against the door as it closed behind him, once again alone. Or not, come to think of it.

At a loss over what to do next, I surveyed my surroundings. As perfect as the view was, the room was almost oppressive, too cushioned and upholstered and cream and pink. And more of those ugly gilt mirrors, with my tired, pale face reflected in them. I frowned and stretched, and the back of my hand bumped into the edge of a small frame.

I turned around to see what it was, exactly. The frame held a small card on which was printed the nightly charge for this suite. Holy shit. Even with my controlling-bastard account, I would be wiped out in no time. And I had no intention of bleeding Carlisle's to stay here.

At least now I knew what I was going to do today.

* * *

><p>"But Mr. Platt has covered your stay indefinitely," the young woman at the Hotel Cipriani reception desk blurted out as she checked her computer, unable to hide her surprise. She was not much older than me, with a mane of blond hair that could almost have rivaled Rosalie's.<p>

"Now he won't have to," I responded, though I wasn't much relishing the thought of searching for a place to stay on the fly. "Um, could you recommend a hotel? A much cheaper one, I mean."

She regarded me and my backpack more sympathetically then. I'd bet she was much more used to seeing Goyard and Hermès than Jansport emblazoned on her clientele's baggage. "My cousin runs one in Santa Croce, near the train station. Would you like me to call to see if there's a vacancy?"

A half hour later I was on Venice's marine equivalent of a bus, a vaporetto, headed to Santa Croce, my heavy backpack left behind with the helpful desk clerk just in case. Her cousin, Alessandro, turned out to be a cute guy in his late 20's with curly dark hair, a willingness to let me negotiate in my broken Italian, and a flirtatious smile. It took me aback at first - for months, even in Rome, I hadn't been on anyone's radar. Which had been fine with me. It still was. Fortunately, I was too young for Alessandro to seriously pursue me, and he was certainly too old for me, and then I had to snort at my skewed interpretation of "too old" after having spent yesterday with creatures whose average age was probably 750.

The hotel was small and plain, and so was the room Alessandro showed me: a bare marble floor, whitewashed walls decorated with only a tiny black and white photograph of the Grand Canal. But it was cheap and clean, and it had a shuttered window a couple of stories above a tiny canal. I took it.

Here too I would hear the waves lapping at stone as I slept.

I headed back by foot, accompanied by the now familiar feeling of bewilderment and wonder in negotiating a new city. I crossed the Rialto bridge with its souvenir shops, now able to compare it with the Ponte Vecchio from the day before, in Florence. I got a cappuccino in a bar to warm my hands. I navigated past the displays of fake designer handbags spread on sheets in crowded passages. I got lost.

But eventually I made it to the Piazza San Marco, skirting the huge puddle in the center. Ignoring the launch that took guests directly to the Cipriani, I hopped onto another vaporetto, another destination in mind. I would retrieve my luggage later.

* * *

><p>The church of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in St. Mark's Basin, was just a few steps across a small piazza from the vaporetto landing. A Renaissance masterpiece designed by Palladio in the shape of a cross, my guidebook told me, and the white façade was all pediments and pilasters reminiscent of the Roman temple ruins that I had explored with Professor di Giovanni and the British ladies. Behind and to the left was a substantial bell tower with a verdigris hat.<p>

I followed a trickle of other visitors through the doors to find a white interior that seemed on the verge of floating, only the colored marble of the floor keeping it earthbound. Palladio's architecture drew you inexorably toward the altar, and I didn't resist, walking up the center aisle, the long arm of the cross, with my head tilted back, gawking ...

Until I saw the dome and its fucking, fucking oculus, looming above the aisle where it met the short arms of the cross. The other visitors were murmuring appreciatively, but I felt dizzy and nauseated. A row of wooden chairs for worshippers was nearby, and I lurched over to one, collapsing on it and hunching over with my arms around my stomach.

_Merda, merda, merda_. Nightmares had driven me out of London and Rome, but I wasn't going to able to go anywhere in Europe if the mere sight of a dome made me want to hurl, a sort of architecture-induced PTSD. There was no stained grate for disposing of bodies here, but the rusty red marble of the floor now made me think of only one thing.

Somebody was talking to me, but I couldn't understand him. "_Mi dispiace_," I mumbled, apologizing, and he said, more loudly, "Miss, are you okay?"

I looked up to see an older, bald man in a black cassock and tunic, one of the Benedictines who officiated at the church. "I just need a minute," I promised him, sure he didn't want me lingering here and drawing stares.

"It's not a problem," he said in a gentle tone. His English was heavily accented but enviably fluent. "Would you care to come to the refectory with me and have a glass of water?"

"Thanks," I said faintly, and he helped me up.

He led me behind the altar and through corridors to a room with age-darkened paneling and a long wooden table, where he had me sit. He left and returned a few seconds later with a glass. The water was barely cool, but it soothed the acid in my throat.

"Thanks," I said again when I was done. "How did you know I spoke English?"

He smiled briefly. "I could say that your accent gave you away, or that all young people seem to speak English today. But the truth is that a very persuasive young man asked me to find you and take you to him," he said.

I froze. The Benedictine looked at me with concern. "Don't you know him? He had –" his hands made an expansive gesture around his bald head "—hair that was … unusual." He didn't seem quite satisfied by his description.

"Crazy? _Pazzi_?" I suggested.

He nodded.

"I know him," I said hastily, not wanting to give the priest time to wonder why he had let himself be sent on an errand by the young man with the crazy hair.

"He said you should come only if you were willing. You are comfortable meeting him?" the Benedictine asked. "He is waiting at the top of the bell tower. I can show you to the lift –"

"Yes, I'll see him," I murmured, standing up even as a new kind of apprehension bloomed in my stomach. I didn't know what he wanted, and I wasn't sure what I wanted either.

* * *

><p>The doors of the elevator stayed open behind me as I stepped out. A short flight of stairs led to the belfry. Gray light streamed in from the arcade of windows on its four sides. It looked empty, even though I knew it wasn't.<p>

"Bella." The familiar voice came from the shadowed corner opposite me.

"Yes."

He moved into the light. The Benedictine was right: his hair did look even wilder than I remembered, as if he had been tugging on it incessantly, but the shadows were gone from under his eyes. He looked as if he had hunted.

He looked magnificent.

Part of me, the part that had been made hopeful by Carlisle's assurances, wanted to run to him, to slam into him. The other part of me – the one that was hurt and doubtful and freshly furious and most of all, acutely aware that Carlisle hadn't seen just how convincing his son was when he told me in the woods that he didn't love me – kept my feet rooted to the floor.

He stopped several feet away from me.

"You came," he said softly. "I need to tell you how sorry I am."

"For what exactly?" I said, anger and uncertainty making my voice uneven. "For telling your family that I was afraid of them?"

He winced and nodded. "That's one thing."

"Why did you do it?"

"So they wouldn't feel guilty about leaving you. They would have left just because I asked – they owed me that - but this way they didn't have to feel guilty about it. I felt guilty enough for all of them."

This wrong-headed but surprisingly understandable answer was like a needle in the bubble of my anger over his lie. I could imagine wanting to do the same thing. Tears immediately threatened to overwhelm me, so I walked to one of the windows, where I could look at the view instead of him. I noted automatically that the dome and oculus that had unnerved me were below, overlooking the monastery cloister; a bit farther, the next stop on the vaporetto, was the tip of Giudecca – I could see the swimming pool of the Cipriani. To the right, I knew, I would see the Doge's Palace across the water.

"Didn't Alice know?" I asked into the air.

"She couldn't," he said behind me. "I couldn't make up my mind what to say to you until the very end, so she didn't see our conversation. She's quite upset with me now."

"But not so upset that she didn't tell you how to find me today."

He knew he didn't need to answer that.

"Why are you here?" I asked him the same question I had asked Carlisle. "Because you feel so guilty? Because of the Volturi? You don't need to babysit me, you know. I've been taking care of myself just fine these last months and Alice says –"

"You nearly got yourself killed yesterday," he interrupted me.

There it was: Bella the weak, fragile human, the perpetual burden. I spun around, propelled by a sudden rage. "I saved 42 people from horrible, painful deaths yesterday," I hissed at him. It was a mixed victory I was claiming – at this very moment, Heidi could be driving another batch of victims to Volterra - but I was claiming it anyway. "And if I had been killed doing it, it would have been worth it."

He was angry too. "Not to me," he said harshly. "If we hadn't been there –"

"If you hadn't been there, I would have died painfully, terrified. But not with regret. Not with regret for the future I wasn't going to live. It would have been a relief instead."

He opened his mouth to speak, but I rushed on. "Besides, isn't that what you wanted for me? Graduate from high school, go to college – hell, you gave me money for it – have a career, marry someone, _die_?" My hands clenched involuntarily into claws in front of me as I ranted. "Be just like everyone else, no matter what I wanted, because it was what you wanted?"

"What _I _wanted," he said, his tone bleak, "was for you to be safe and happy. Instead, you fell into the hands of the vampire mafia. And Caius might have killed you, but it's just as likely that Aro would have turned you, even though you said you didn't want that." He looked at me as if seeking confirmation.

"No, I didn't."

We stared at each other silently for a moment. A breeze blew through my hair and toward him, but he didn't flinch. In acknowledgment of the brisk air that didn't bother him, he wore a leather jacket, the one he had on for our first dinner in Port Angeles. It was a reminder of another time he had had to save me, and that he hadn't answered my question.

"Carlisle told me that you went to Forks," I said. "Why?"

"I needed to see you and -"

"And I wasn't there." I interrupted him this time. "As I was supposed to be."

He seemed bewildered by the resentment in my voice. "I was surprised, yes. Though I'm not surprised at all that you could manage to get yourself to Europe and live here. You're very practical." He gave me a ghost of a smile. "And considering that Laurent was skulking around Forks, it was a good thing that you were gone. The wolves remembered him with red eyes, so obviously he hadn't been able to follow our diet. If he had encountered you…" he trailed off.

"Why was Laurent there?" I couldn't help asking.

"We don't know. Looking for us, presumably, for reasons we don't understand. The cousins in Alaska didn't know why he left, and the wolves didn't pause to engage him in conversation." He shook his head. "And then I went to Ithaca. And Rome." He flinched again. "And Volterra … "

"And now here," I finished for him. "And I don't understand why. We said our goodbyes," I said euphemistically, but I crossed my arms in front of me, betraying my need to protect myself.

His hands raked though his hair and he stepped closer to me. I recoiled, and he looked bewildered again.

"Bella, can you not stand to be near me?" he asked. "Carlisle told me you can't even say my name. Have I hurt you so much that you want to move on? That would be - quite fair."

I stared at him in disbelief. "_Me_, move on?" I repeated. "You don't want me. You told me."

"I'm a good liar, Bella; I have to be," he said, and he hurried on when he saw me flinch. "When I said I didn't love you, it was the blackest kind of blasphemy. I'm so sorry. I left because I thought it would protect you from my kind. But it didn't."

"Wait," I said, my hands dropping to my sides. "You left to _protect _me?"

"Yes, and it didn't work, and I have to apologize – "

"You decided this without me, without hearing what I wanted," I said flatly.

"I _knew_ what you would want. You would have played down the danger we posed to you."

He was right. "I would have," I admitted. "Maybe I would have convinced you to stay. But you didn't give me the choice. And I can understand why you lied to your family, but you took their choice away too."

"That's exactly what Carlisle and Alice told me, too," he said ruefully. "And if I had stayed, you might have faced Laurent, but at least we would have faced him together. Nor would you have been kidnapped by Heidi."

He kept talking about how ineffectual he had been in protecting me, but I was more focused on how effective he had been in devastating me.

"So instead of telling me the truth, you told me I wasn't good for you."

His shoulders slumped as I said this, but then he straightened up and looked me in the eyes. "You believed me so easily. How could you have let a few words break your faith in me? It was as if everything I had said before to you meant nothing."

"Because those few words negated all that! You made me feel –-" I started, but then stopped, realizing then just how right Carlisle was about my insecurities. I was responsible for my own feelings. "I felt so worthless," I said. "And stupid to have thought that I could have possibly held your interest. You said it yourself, you're a very good liar. Why wouldn't I believe you? Everyone else does."

He was still for several seconds, pensive, then nodded. "I might have been more persuasive than I thought. I certainly didn't feel persuasive. Yet in that moment, you didn't fight it. I could easily imagine you forgetting me, making a life without me," he said.

"I didn't."

"Bella, look at you, thousands of miles from home, doing something you have never done before. Learning. You even got a job. And I … I just wallowed. I tried to track Victoria –"

"What?" I felt the blood drain from my face.

He shrugged. "She easily evaded me, so I failed at that. As I failed in my promise to leave you alone. I went to Forks because I couldn't stay away anymore."

"Stop," I cried, remembering Carlisle's words from this morning about love among his kind.

I was no longer content to be an addict's brand of heroin.

"You're like Mr. Darcy," I said bitterly. He looked surprised. "In the middle of 'Pride and Prejudice,' not at the end."

The confusion on his face disappeared. He had to know exactly what I meant, but the ball of hurt and rejection in my chest propelled me on. "Darcy tells Elizabeth that he can't stay away from her despite his contempt for her family and in spite of her all-around unsuitability. You were with me despite your best judgment, despite my slow mind and clumsy body. Unable to resist me because of the blood that tortures you, the scent that entrapped you. I was someone you hated yourself for wanting. Your 'shameful obsession,'" I said, quoting Aro. "Someone who needed to be controlled and manipulated. Someone to lie to, someone to pay off. Someone unequal to you, someone you didn't respect."

I had to stop and take a breath.

"No." He leaned forward, the words pouring out. "In all these last months, I have missed so much. The mysterious workings of your mind. Your kind impulses that renew my belief in the worth of humanity. The feel of your body warm and curled in my arms. The heat of your skin on mine. The fragrance of your hair as I brushed it off your face. Your voice in my ear. The words you said only to me. Your lips –" he paused, and my lips burned as he stared at them "—your lips as you said them."

He lifted his hand as if to touch me, then dropped it. "But never your blood. Not once did I miss your blood. And to see you dead in Alice's mind – not once, but repeatedly as Heidi played with possibilities, as Caius became determined to kill you … and then that loathsome Jane contemplating how she could torment you for embarrassing her in front of all the Volturi … that was a torture far worse than your blood ever was for me."

He too had to stop and take a breath, but then he continued. "Darcy says at the end, 'I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation' for falling in love, but I can. I knew it when I first heard you say my name in your sleep. It wasn't your blood that was calling me, but _you_. And we _are_ unequal, but not in the way you seem to think. You deserve my respect. It is I who doesn't deserve yours."

I was gaping at him, his words dissolving the knot in my chest, making my heart almost whole. This beautiful boy, this tortured man, loved me. But the self-disgust in his voice at the end drove me to ask, "How can you say that?"

"How can you love a killer, Bella?"

"I can't," I answered, and he bowed his head. "But I can love the man who is trying not to be one. I did love someone like that, but he didn't believe me. Or maybe it's just that he _believed so easily _that I'd be fine without him."

His face shot up at that, and he half-smiled. "You're saying that we both have problems with insecurities?"

"I'm sure Carlisle would say so," I said dryly.

"He already did," he said, his tone equally dry. "Perhaps that just means that we're perfect for each other."

He stepped closer, the only vampire able to dazzle me. I wanted him to kiss me. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted –

"Don't," I whispered, turning my head, and he retreated. He still had no trouble with that form of respect, I noted. But I filed that observation away for later.

"Carlisle also said vampires don't have a choice about loving someone," I said. "That it's like a compulsion."

"It is true," he said, and his smile was wistful now. "And indeed, when you put it that way, it sounds ..."

"Forced," I said. "Unwanted." His expression encouraged me to continue. "Something that might make you feel that you need to leave again to protect me."

He shook his head. "Not unwanted. Overwhelming and sometimes agonizing, but not unwanted. And you have to see, Bella, that it's different now." His tone was pleading. "Before, as Aro said, I _was_ ashamed. I tried to find ways to spare you, and ashamed that I couldn't stop myself. But now I'm shameless. I would never be able to leave you again –"

"Even if Jasper took a snap at me?"

His gaze was steady on me. "Yes. Even then. I have no insecurities at all about that," he said. "But are you saying all this because you want me to … move on from you?"

This was a day for my jaw to drop, apparently. "Can't you see that I want nothing more than to be with you?" I finally managed to say. The relief on his face was such a balm to my heart that I nearly couldn't go on, but I did. "But we wouldn't be happy."

Turned away from him abruptly, I walked to a window on the other side, facing southeast. Now I saw hazy shapes of out islands, the Adriatic stretching to the horizon. "We'd always be looking over our shoulders," I clarified.

He had followed me silently, and his voice was close behind me. "Because you … _we _have a deadline."

"Yes."

"What made you change your mind? Before … "

"Yes, before you probably worried that I would ask any random vampire I met to turn me," I said, but my tone wasn't joking. My fingers rubbed the wind-worn stone of the arcade. He didn't bother trying to contradict me.

"Aside from the whole not wanting to be obviously older than you part, that was because I felt so - thank you, Carlisle – insecure about being with you. If I were a vampire, I'd be faster, more graceful, stronger, pretty." I heard grumbling behind me, and I raised my hand to stop him, because I knew he _would _contradict me about that. I pushed away from the windows and turned to face him once more. "But when Aro asked me … "

"You said you preferred to die," he said, his voice tight.

"No, I said I didn't want to be one of them. I'm only human. I don't want to die." I drew in a breath and sighed it out unsteadily. "But these last months - I can't believe that I would have forgotten you after the change. I would have been frozen forever missing you. And even more than all that, I realized that I didn't want my eternity to be Aro's choice. I wanted it to be yours."

"The choice is yours," he said gravely, but I shook my head.

"If it is, then I want it to be ours together. And you said no when Aro asked Carlisle to change me."

He vanished from my sight, and it took me a moment to realize that he was pacing, too fast for me to follow his movements. I startled when he reappeared directly in front of me, but he didn't apologize. "When Aro did that, he wasn't being sincere: he was still imagining changing you himself - it sickened me. And what he planned to do afterward..." I decided that if I wanted to sleep at night, I shouldn't ask what exactly Aro's plans were. "But what was worse was earlier, when I heard you tell him no."

He scrubbed his hand across his face as if to banish the images. "All of them in the chamber kept replaying that in their heads. They were anticipating watching you die. And all I could think was that you couldn't die. Not now, not after some human lifespan, not ever." His words were a torrent now. "Which means that as much as it makes me feel despicable for wanting it, I want you to change. I'm selfish enough, more than selfish enough, to want you to give up your parents, a future with a human family of your own, perhaps even your chance at heaven, just to be with me. It's a lot to ask, Bella. So much. I can't ask Carlisle to take responsibility for that."

"You would do it yourself," I murmured.

"Please, Bella," he said softly. "Make me _your _choice."

"Yes."

The word dropped into a silence that even the seagulls didn't interrupt. The wind still blew in, carrying off regrets and leaving behind the scent of sea and the new spring. But I didn't move to him, even though I knew he was waiting. Instead, we stared at each other again for a long time, still, and I couldn't help thinking of that day in biology when our teacher showed a video and I longed to reach out to the boy just inches away from me, but couldn't.

"I'm moving out of the Cipriani," I finally said.

"I know." He exhaled heavily. "Bella, can't you touch me, even now? Say my name?"

His frustration was so adorable that I forgot for a moment why I was resisting. I had to shake my head to clear it. "Not yet," I said, but smiled.

"Then when?" He looked genuinely puzzled.

"When you stop being a controlling bastard," I said, winking at him to take some of the sting out of my words. His gold eyes thoughtful, he made no effort to prevent me from twisting past him and heading to the open doors of the elevator. They closed on his flawless face, and I wrapped my arms around myself, this time in exultation instead of defense, on the ride down.

* * *

><p>My cell rang just as I made it inside my new room in Santa Croce. I dropped my baggage on the marble floor and looked at the screen.<p>

"Alice!" I answered. Her response was a long, incomprehensible series of screeches and squeals. "Alice, Alice, stop!" I said, laughing. "I didn't understand a single thing you just said. Shouldn't you be on an airplane?"

"We have a layover in Frankfurt on our way to New York," she said more slowly, her voice lovely even through my cheap phone. "What is it that the lying asshole has to do to get in your good graces? He promised _me_ an extremely impractical car, my favorite kind."

I smiled at hearing Alice echo my own description of her brother, but I nonetheless had an urge to defend him. "He meant well," I said.

"Pfft." Always so elegant, Alice was.

"Anyway," I said to tease her, "don't you already know I want?"

"No, because you've decided not to tell me, you know that," she complained. "What if he needs my help?"

"He's a smart guy, he'll figure it out himself."

"Oh, come on, Bella –aw, dammit!"

"What?" I said in alarm. "Have you seen something going wrong?"

"_Yes._ Well, no. That is, it's merely exceedingly annoying. And it's about you."

"What?"

A wickedly satisfied giggle was her response.

"Alice!" I wailed.

"You have your secrets, I have mine." She sighed. "I'm so happy to be able to talk to you again!"

"Me too," I agreed. "I've missed you."

* * *

><p>That night, before I crawled into bed, I went to my window and looked down. The canal was so small and little-used that there were no banks, no jetties, and no lights - perfect. I left the shutter wide open. I had no desire to be subtle.<p>

The next morning, I woke up to find the shutter closed, and an extra blanket over me. Someone else wasn't being subtle either.

As I hurried through breakfast, that ubiquitous Italian hip-hop-ish song played on the radio station in the dining room –- "_io starò solo a guardare/__Mi metterò seduto con lo sguardo fisso su di te/ perché ho imparato ad aspettare," _the singer chanted - and I asked Alessandro what it was about as he cleared away my plate.

"I'll just be left watching. I'll sit and stare at you because I learned to wait," he translated for me.

How suitable, because the beautiful boy was watching and waiting in the alley that led to the hotel. He followed me wordlessly as I headed to the ATM in preparation for a day of wandering about Venice.

So it was that in the days that followed I discovered the pleasure of traveling with a companion, especially one who thoroughly knew the city and the language but, perhaps on the advice of Carlisle, let me try to figure things out on my own before offering his help. Which was a good thing, because hearing him speak Italian was a knee-weakening experience.

We visited St. Mark's and a few streets away the Church of the Shapely Virgin; his company helped calm my heartbeat when I walked under their domes, keeping my gaze on the floor. He watched me eat fried olives and black linguine and fabulous gelato with only the faintest expression of disgust. On the sunny day that interrupted our string of gray skies, he drove me to Vicenza on the mainland to see the Palladian villas there while he hunted in the Dolomites. He read me the newspaper accounts of Berlusconi's loss in the election; I thought of sending a text of congratulations to Simona in Rome, but realized that now, more than ever, we couldn't really be friends – it'd be safest for her if she never heard from me again.

When we went to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, which seemed be a sort of Renaissance Elks Lodge that just happened to be decorated by Tintoretto, we were given small mirrors so we could see the paintings on the ceiling – one of the glories of the place – without straining our necks. I couldn't resist angling mine so that I could look at him instead without openly staring. He noticed, though.

"These Tintorettos won't always be around, but I will," he murmured into my ear. His mere proximity was knee-weakening too.

"_You're _always looking at _me_," I at last managed to point out.

"But you are a changeable creature, Miss Swan," he answered, his choice of adjective laden with meaning.

That was the closest our conversations came to a heavy topic, and he didn't ask about the condition that I had imposed in the bell tower. Nor did he seek to touch me, even to tuck my hair behind my ear as he had once done so often, and I kept my hands to myself too. That unreleased tension was probably why every morning I woke up with my skin damp and my limbs twisted in the sheets: Dream Bella was touched all night long in ways that Real Bella had only ever imagined.

And every morning I woke up alone, but hopeful that this was the day.

Then one day it was. My wallet cleaned out by dinner the night before, I went to the ATM on the main drag of Santa Croce for my hit and checked my account balance. My "scholarship" payment hadn't come in, and I was sure that it wasn't because of WaMu's incompetence.

He had figured it out.

I turned around. He was leaning, in that casually alluring way he had, across the street in the doorway of a mask shop that hadn't opened yet for the day.

"Edward," I whispered, saying the name, his name, finally, in a sigh of relief, and I walked to him.

"I should have realized immediately that of everything wrong I had done, the last thing that you would forgive me for was giving you money," he said as I beamed up at him.

"It wasn't the money, it was what it represented – a life without you," I said. I put my hands on his chest, whimpering a bit at the feel of his flesh under his shirt. "Edward?"

"Bella?"

"I'm going to kiss you now."

And I did.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Some links__ to the places mentioned here on my profile page. San Giorgio Maggiore is one of my favorite churches in Venice, so I feel bad having Bella get freaked out there, but it all worked out, right? If you go to Venice, go see it, and the even more dome-y Santa Maria della Salute._

_Church of the Shapely Virgin = Santa Maria Formosa, built on the site where Mary appeared in the form of a curvaceous woman._

_The song is again "Svegliarsi La Mattina," by Zero Assoluto, which was quite a hit in Italy in 2006. Berlusconi did indeed lose an election in 2006, but then came back in 2008._

_Thanks for reading and the reviews (including from those of you without accounts I can't respond to, and whatever is going on with the outdated links._

_And do check out my continuing translation of Elysabeth's fabulous story "The Eyes of the Moon" (on my profile page) or her original (on my favorites page). _

_Mr. Price here: Don't you all think we should stop talking about feelings and get some lemons already? I mean, come on. . ._


	7. Chapter 7

_Disclaimer: SMeyer owns "Twilight" and its outtakes, not I._

_Recap: In the last chapter, Edward got his name back after figuring out how he was being a controlling bastard to Bella. They kiss._

_At some point, I suggested that this would be the last chapter. But it's not. Anyway, all the rest is pretty much all fluffersmutter. Or smutterfluffer. Whatever._

_Thanks to Camilla10. And, I guess, Mr. Price._

* * *

><p>Chapter 7<p>

One kiss turned into 20, and then the owner of the mask shop stamped an elegantly shod foot before theatrically clearing her throat, reminding us that we were blocking her door. Edward gave her a brilliant smile and smooth apology that left her stammering, and we walked back down the street to the alley leading to my little hotel.

We paused for a kiss, or three, against the beige stucco wall, then stumbled, or at least I did, to my room, passing a surprised Alessandro and the Senegalese woman mopping the hallway. She shrank back from the supernatural predator, and I tried to send her a reassuring look, though I knew it was pointless. It was something I would have to get used to again, as much as I wished everyone else could see Edward as I did.

Well, not exactly as I did, for some time later Edward and I were closer to naked than we'd ever been before. Unfortunately, I was also shivering.

"Damn," I muttered as he retreated from me and pulled up the bedclothes between us and around me.

"We need to get an electric blanket," he said.

"Yeah, we should. Why didn't we have one in Forks?" I asked.

He looked guilty. "I thought of it," he admitted. "But I decided that we needed the temperature barrier between us. "

"_We_ needed it?"

He winced. "I didn't deserve to be that close to you."

"That means I didn't deserve it either," I said, narrowing my eyes at him.

"I'm sorry. And we'll rectify this lack as soon as we can. But we also need to decide what we're doing next."

"Hanging out in bed sounds good," I said hopefully. God, did it sound good, especially since Edward had somehow seemed to have forgotten the boundaries he had set for us before. My shirt had landed on a chair across the room, his shirt was on the floor; his palm had just curved with infinite care around my ribcage, inches from my hammering heart, when my shivers had betrayed me. I longed to ask what had changed, but just in case he really had forgotten those boundaries, I didn't want to remind him.

"It does," he agreed, kissing me again. Happily, mouth to mouth was not too cold for comfort. "Except for one thing," he added, replacing his lips on mine with his icy fingers and drawing them down my throat so that I shivered again.

"Oh, fine. Let's talk," I said, snuggling into the bed.

"Now that you're not longer a scholarship student, what are your plans?" he asked. "Do you want to return to Forks?"

I was silent a moment, because despite being a practical person in many ways, I'd spent the time since our conversation in the bell tower simply waiting and hoping. What did I want to do? I definitely didn't want to go home yet with months left before I could even think about taking the G.E.D. … or whatever convention dictated that I do in the human time left to me. In fact, traveling around the world with the man lying next to me would be my preference by far. But I would quickly be impoverished in euro-land, and he knew that.

"No, I don't want to go back," I replied finally. "And yes, I see your none-too-subtle point. I'll be out of money pretty soon here."

"So you would like to continue traveling?"

I squirmed in my swaddling. "With your money?" I asked for clarification.

"My money?" He raised an eyebrow. "If you choose to see it that way. But that is the logical option, wouldn't you say?"

I nodded warily.

"We should leave Venice. We've enjoyed some favorable weather," he said, without any acknowledgment of the irony that what was favorable for us would be deemed unfortunate for anyone else. "But the sun is coming, and so are many more travelers. It will become oppressively crowded here."

"Okay," I said. "Where do you think we should go next?"

"You'll find out."

"No!" I yelped, flailing in the sheets. "No more unilateral decisions!"

Even lying down, he managed to shrug gracefully. "My money, my decision. Our money, our decision."

I glared at him, and he sighed and pulled himself away so that he was sitting up. I hated that sigh, that sign of his exasperation. By the time I had struggled out of the sheets so I could join him, he had retrieved my shirt and was waiting to hand it to me.

"Why are you sighing?" I asked as I slid my arms through the sleeves. "Why are you annoyed at me?"

"I am not annoyed at you. But I am frustrated that we are so far apart on this subject. Why are you so reluctant to accept my money, to think of it as yours? It's not even a sacrifice for me."

I was the one to sigh this time. "You've never been in a situation where you couldn't make ends meet, right? But when I was with Renee, she lived paycheck to paycheck, even though Charlie was pretty good about child support. And I ended up dealing with the phone calls and letters from bill collectors, and knowing that Renee was borrowing money from co-workers and boyfriends to make the rent. So money was always a worry. We needed it and I hated that we needed it."

"Rather like us and blood."

"Yeah, I guess," I said uncertainly, not having seen it that way before. "I don't like being beholden. And I'm uncomfortable being dependent on the kindness of strangers." I said the line from "A Streetcar Named Desire" with a bad Southern accent to lighten the atmosphere, and he laughed.

"Okay, Blanche. But," he continued more earnestly, "we Cullens _are _dependent. Emotionally, certainly, because it would be extraordinarily difficult to maintain our diet without one another's support, but also financially. And there's no expectation of being beholden to anyone, or controlling anyone. Our mutual dependence is what makes us family. A family that you're part of.

"When I set up that scholarship fund for you, it wasn't with any idea of controlling you, or forcing you into choices I wanted you to make. Quite the opposite: I wanted you to be able to make your own choices, choices that weren't dependent on money."

"It felt like an order," I muttered. "And bribery."

"Carlisle told me that, and I'm so sorry. It wasn't meant that way at all. I never for a moment thought you would tell anyone about us. You have to understand that. Please?"

I nodded because I did see that now, and he went on. "And while I have to admit that your dropping out of school wasn't among the things I hoped or expected you would do, what you did with the money, coming here to Europe, accorded perfectly with my intent. You saw the money as an order, an obligation, but in our family we see money as freedom, and privacy: it's what allows us to live as we do without too many questions."

I slid my fingers along his jaw and into his hair because, well, I had the freedom to do that now. "I can see that, but you can see, can't you, why I would take it the way I did, in the circumstances?" I asked.

He closed his eyes as I rubbed his scalp gently. "I can now," he said after a moment, "but I couldn't then, not in the state I was in – and you know that for a vampire that had to be quite a state. So it didn't occur to me that my methods would provoke your resentment. I saw only that having our lawyers structure it as a scholarship would give you an easy answer when people asked where you got the money."

"Like Mrs. Stanley."

"Especially Sharon Stanley. " He opened his eyes and a flash of annoyance crossed his face so that I dropped my hand. "Not only could she not give me any information on where you were, her mental commentary on me, you and the rest of my family was appalling."

"You visited her at the bank?" I asked. "Before you broke into it?" He nodded. "You really broke into it?"

He waved that off. "There was no damage … that anyone noticed. The more important question is, can you see my money, my family's money, as _our _money? As _our family's_ money?"

I opened my mouth, then bit my lip, unable to say the words.

"You are going to give up your life because of us," Edward said gently. "Why can't you accept from me, from my family, something that is so paltry by comparison?"

When he put it that way, I felt like a jerk. "I'll try," I said, and gave him a weak smile.

"Good," he said, willing to claim victory where he could. "So, on to the subject at hand: where would you like to go next?"

I giggled a little. "Jeez, after all that, I have no idea. What do you suggest?"

"Ljubljana, Vienna, Bratislava, Lisbon, Edinburgh, Dublin or London," he said immediately.

"And what connects all those cities is ...? "

"Weather," he said, grimacing. "The places in between will be sunny for a stretch. It is one of the disadvantages to traveling with me."

"Huh. I guess we won't be seeing Athens, then."

"No," he corrected me. "We can ... in December or January. We can go anywhere when the timing is right."

"Oh. Do we have to leave here immediately?"

"No, but I can't go out safely beyond tomorrow. Besides, I find your landlord troubling."

"Alessandro?" I frowned. Alessandro had been so nice to me. "You only saw him just now. He can't be thinking anything odd about you yet."

"Oh, but I've heard him," Edward said, his words reminding me where he had been the last several nights. "And he certainly thinks about _you._"

"C'mon, I'm too young for him," I said reflexively.

He slid down onto his back, laughing. "In all my years of reading reactions to Rosalie and Alice, I've almost never heard someone think they were too young for him. Inexplicably intimidating and unapproachable, certainly, but not too young. Eighteen-year-old girls are almost universally attractive, and most are unaware of it. And men are swine."

"What about women?" I said, daring to rest my hand on his stomach, really asking about their reaction to him.

He inhaled sharply and shuddered. "Sorry," I said. I began moving my hand away, but he captured it and put it back on his skin.

"I like it. Where was I? Um, women are much better behaved," he said. "They actually like men their own age, though they'll often make exceptions for Carlisle, I've found …. In any case, you have a landlord, not a landlady." He smiled at me. "Now, enough talk about Alessandro. Your hand, however …"

I smiled back at him. He was giving me permission to explore. And I would, at least until my fingers grew numb.

* * *

><p>If I wanted to avoid a problem with my visa, I'd have to go back to Britain, but not yet. Vienna, I decided.<p>

But before we went, I had to do something uncomfortable first. "Dad?" I said into my phone as Edward flipped through my guidebook's section on Vienna - he hadn't been there for "a while," which meant since before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"Bella," Charlie answered, worry obvious in his voice. Edward looked up sharply. "You're not calling me to say you're coming home, are you?"

"Is something wrong?" Thoughts of wolves and vampire enforcers flitted through my mind.

"The Cullens are here," Charlie whispered as if to hide the news from the other people around him at the police station. I frowned at Edward, who tapped his wrist to indicate that he hadn't had time to tell me. "I ran into Alice Cullen, who chattered on about how much she had missed Forks and was coming back to finish school here and how Carlisle was returning to the hospital. But I don't know if - well, I realized after that she didn't say anything about that boy –"

"Because he's here in Venice," I interrupted him. There didn't seem to be a gentle way to say this now. "With me."

The silence wasn't deafening, because my cheap phone had plenty of static. But it was heavy until Charlie broke it.

Charlie being Charlie, he didn't waste time asking for the hows and wheres. He went straight to the point. "Did he explain himself?" he asked.

"Yes." Edward extended his hand in a mute request for the phone, but I shook my head at him.

"And you gave forgave him?" Charlie went on.

"Yes."

"Are you sure about this?"

"Yes."

"Tell that boy he doesn't have my forgiveness."

"I'm sure he already knows."

"Good."

* * *

><p>We made a last visit to San Giorgio Maggiore so that I could actually absorb the peerless view from the bell tower, and that evening we walked along the canals, stopping to kiss on quiet little bridges like new lovers on their first night in Venice, the moon shining on the water in a portent of sunny skies ahead. The next day we drove out of the city where we had rediscovered each other. We headed northeast in another sleek Audi, speeding through the unguarded crossing to Austria, stopping in Graz for lunch and to buy a blanket, and Vienna was well and truly clouded over when we arrived there.<p>

When I objected to the expensive hotel Edward was used to staying at – "We're spending my money, after all," I pointed out, cleverly, I thought – he pointed out that a hostel wouldn't have a valet who could park the car and drive it back into the shadow of the awning covering the hotel entrance if the sun made an unexpected appearance.

"Also, it's spacious and extremely comfortable," he added slyly after I had acquiesced.

The place was all that, I had to admit, when I saw our sixth-floor suite, decorated in grays and creams; its quiet elegance was a pleasant contrast to the white, trim-laden exterior of the hotel, which made me think of a wedding cake. Whatever we were paying, it was probably worth it.

Vienna had never been somewhere I had dreamed of going, but I fell under its charm as we walked a few blocks to a restaurant for my dinner. Perhaps that had 99 percent to do with my companion, who spoke German with a flowing cadence that was nearly as knee-weakening as his Italian, but it was also because Vienna felt like a real city, not a beautiful decaying museum like Venice. It wasn't as lively as London, say, but the streets were filled with people biking home from work and stepping into busy bars and crowded cafes.

White asparagus was in season, and it seemed to be in every dish on the menu of the restaurant, which was casual but obviously fashionable, with high white walls that were covered with ribbons of graffiti letters. It was also delicious. I knew that human food either disgusted or baffled Edward, but the asparagus seemed to bother him most of all – he eyed me uneasily, shifting in his seat, until I finished off the fat white stalks, holding them in my fingers and washing them down with a glass of Grüner Veltliner as the Viennese around us did. He looked so uncomfortable that I asked him if he was all right, but he shrugged off my question.

That night we put our new blanket to use.

It was a wondrous thing. A few times, in the summer before my ill-starred birthday, we had gone to the meadow when the sun was strong enough to warm Edward's skin as we lay together talking or reading or chastely touching. Here, with Edward's rules about necking having been abandoned somewhere between Forks and Venice, we weren't so chaste, and the feel of bare warm flesh against bare warmed flesh was devastating.

"My God … this feels amazing," I gasped after I slid off the hotel's robe and slipped under the covers where he was waiting. The familiar jolt upon contact was there, but it competed with the deliciousness of his legs scissored in mine, of our torsos touching. I ran a hand over his shoulder and down his back in fascination, but I stopped when his eyes snapped shut and he seemed to freeze in place. _Crap._ "Edward? Are you all right?"

His eyes opened and he smiled slowly. "Yes," he finally said. "Yes, I am. I'm just trying to wrap my mind around the idea that you and I will feel this good to each other every time we touch this way."

"We will?" That too was amazing.

"We will," he promised me. "It is one of the advantages to traveling with me." Heated fingers caressed my face. "Your skin, your cheek … your lips," a fingertip ran over the seam of my mouth, "your lips will always be this sublime to me."

His own lips followed the path his fingers had taken, then moved down the side of my neck, brushing against the skin even as his palm curled around my ribcage again. This time my shivers weren't from cold.

"Nobody would ever have felt this way to me," he murmured into the hollow under my ear, then pulled back slightly to look at me. "And nobody else will ever feel this good to you," he said, his eyes darkening even as I stared into them. "Not that you'll ever have a chance to find out."

A flare bloomed in my chest at his words. "Controlling bastard," I stuttered out.

"I am, that way. I'm not ashamed of it."

I sat up a bit so I could maneuver. "Then I guess I'm a controlling bastard too, because you'll never get a chance to find out either," I told him. He let me push him onto his back, and I attacked his neck. Unlike him, I didn't have to hold back; I scraped my teeth against his skin, sucked at his flesh, did my vain best to mark him as he shuddered underneath me. My own hands explored his chest, and then my mouth did. His scent was so powerful here, I lost track of time, and myself, and concentrated only on dragging my tongue across his collarbone, grazing my nails on his nipples.

Until I was suddenly whirled away so that Edward was hovering over me and pinning my hands above my head. "Jesus, Bella, give me a minute, I'm destroying the sheets," he growled, then groaned as he looked down my body. Our movements had pulled the blankets down to our waists. He released my hands and slid down so his face was level with my chest.

"Minute's up," he murmured, and lowered his lips to the swell of my breast.

I fleetingly thought to scold him for talking to my cleavage, but all I could manage was a whimper for a long time.

* * *

><p>That was as far as we went that night; my fingers caught in one of the rips in the sheet and split it to the hem, and the sound startled us into realizing that we should stop while we could. I dropped off into sleep, Edward molded around me, and the contact made it the best night's rest I'd had since my birthday.<p>

The next day a courier from the Cullens' lawyer showed up at the hotel with an envelope that held documents of various shapes and sizes. I watched as Edward affixed a rectangle of paper to a page in my passport. It had French words on it, and was covered with watermarks and shiny lines.

"Is that legit?" He raised an eyebrow at my question. "Never mind, I don't want to know," I said hastily.

"This document says that you're a resident of France, so you can travel in Europe as long as you like without violating the visa rules," he explained.

"Really? And where do I live in France?"

"You have a very pleasant 19th-century town house in a leafy suburb of Paris."

I should have known. _Well, Bella, if you don't like the answer, don't ask the question. _

He acquired a suit and I a dress, and we went to the opera house we could see from our terrace in the Hotel Cake. The Staatsoper had the extravagant architectural details that Austria's Hapsburg emperors had loved, but it was even more impressive once Edward told me that the red and gold auditorium and many of the opulent reception rooms had had to be rebuilt after it was bombarded by the Americans during World War II.

It was my first time seeing an opera, and I hoped I would like it since he so obviously did. Fortunately, it was an easy one, Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro," played for broad laughs on a two-level set, and filled with melodies that were vaguely familiar. I watched the English translations of the Italian libretto on a little screen in the seat; Edward, who had no need of such aid, watched me.

"That was a lot of work just to get to a wedding," I observed during intermission, in between sipping champagne and trying not to gawk at Edward. I wasn't the only woman in the vicinity with the same problem, because damn, the man looked good in a suit. But I was the only gawker who would be taking off his tie later.

"There'd be no opera if it were easy."

"_We_ could be an opera," I said thoughtfully.

He flinched. "Let's not be. So many operas end badly."

We also had a night of talking about how we had felt after things had ended badly on my birthday. It was a hard night. I forced myself to be honest – and it was necessary since he had Sharon Stanley's mental image of me looking haggard as I deposited my paychecks etched forever in his own mind. When we were finished, I was exhausted and Edward was so wound up that I made him promise to go for a run in the Vienna Woods while I slept. We weren't over everything yet – the hurt and resentment had left their traces on me, the self-loathing and despair on him – but I knew he would come back.

The rest of our nights, though, he spent hours and hours putting into practice nine decades of theory of how to give pleasure – a caress down my spine, a brush of his fingertips across my breast, his palm sweeping up the inside of my thigh and beyond, exploring me in ways I had never done myself. I did the same to him, if less adeptly and with less knowledge, but that had its advantages: my skill increased along with his control and the survival rate of our bed linens.

Still, considering the time we devoted to our mutual exploration, we moved very slowly. That was because he was cautious and I was clueless, but also because it was also glorious to linger. After that first night, I was better at warning him before moving into new territory; he relaxed as he learned to trust me.

So it was that I had to gather my courage and say the words. "I want to do that to you too," I whispered into his neck one night after he had stroked me to climax, my hands still fisted in reaction. He made a noise I took as a yes. "But I don't know how to do it right. I don't know what will feel good to you," I confessed. I had been around vampires enough to have some small sense of how strong and fast they were – I could be neither as strong nor as fast as they would want.

He was quiet for a moment, and I waited. Finally, he took one of my clenched hands and kissed the knuckles. His face was intent in the soft light of our bedroom. "Whatever you do will feel –" he searched for a word, then gave up "—beyond anything I can describe. I can guarantee you that."

"You can?"

"I can."

He pulled my hand down under the cover, to his erection, which twitched when my fingers touched the skin there. He moaned, then smiled impishly. "See?" he murmured. "Your slightest touch feels good."

"Yeah," I said, torn between doubt and the urge to put my fingers on him again, "but that's not enough to –"

"Just let me show you?"

I nodded, and he guided my hand around his length. "This," he said, squeezing my hand tight and pulling up, "is enough. But so is this." He loosened his grip so that I was barely holding him and drew my fingers up slowly. "My kind," he grunted as our hands continued moving languidly, "is sensitive to any contact, even if it would be too soft or even imperceptible to a human. However you touch me –" his breath caught as my palm curved over his tip – "will be the right way."

Thus encouraged, I continued my investigation, which was met by his gratifying responses. But the angle was awkward and I stopped.

"Would you sit up?" I whispered. He moved with startling speed to the edge of the bed, his feet on the floor. I scooted over so that I was behind him and touched his shoulder; we were both warm enough to go without the electric blanket for a while. Perfect.

I inched closer until my thighs were around his hips and my breasts pressed to his back. We both moaned at this new contact – because he didn't sleep, he was always curled around me, so he could watch as I drifted off. I had never spooned him. That was a situation I would have to change, obviously, because this felt too awesome not to repeat frequently.

In this position I could nibble on his shoulder blade, sweep my lips against his vertebrae after giving him a second to be prepared; I could snake my arms around his waist and caress his torso, slowly making my way down to the tops of his thighs.

"Okay?" I murmured as warning.

"Thank _God,_" he said in answer, and my hands returned to his erection, moving the incredibly soft skin over the hardness of his length. I kept my strokes at a steady pressure and speed that was comfortable for me, and laid my head against his back, feeling his inhales and exhales quicken under my cheek, the rumbles of his groans under my ear. His arms brushed my own as his hands gripped his thighs to help him focus, the muscles in his forearms tensed into stone. I couldn't keep my sex from pressing against his skin, and that seemed to undo him; he arched and stilled, and my hands became too slippery to stay on him.

We stayed as we were for several moments, our breaths slowing, before he left for a second and returned with a towel. He handed it to me as I grinned up at him, thrilled at what I had done and frankly admiring how at ease he seemed standing naked in front of me. Maybe that wasn't a problem when you had a flawless body, but it was also evidence of a sexual openness that I once would not have expected from someone of his era.

"You are adorable," he said, laughing.

"I am extremely proud of myself," I said, tossing the towel to him so he could use it.

He considered that a moment. "I am proud of myself too," he said, wonder in his voice. He leaned forward, bracketing my thighs with his arms as he kissed me. My arms wound around his neck, and he guided us back down onto the mattress and pulled the blanket back over us.

We kissed for a long while before I pulled back, struck by a question that stirred in my meager storehouse of sexual knowledge.

"Edward?"

"Hmmm?" With my lips moving, his moved to my ear.

"Uh," I stuttered. "Um, why didn't we need, um, lube when we just did that? Is that a vampire thing?"

That stopped him. "Such a 21st century question," he mused, a finger tracing my jaw.

"Asking about vampires?"

"Smartmouth. So, I was born in 1901."

"I know," I said, puzzled.

"And most baby boys in America in 1901 weren't circumcised." He gave me a mischievous smile. "Men of your father's generation, however –"

"Stop right there." I cut him off and gave him a dirty look. "Lube," I demanded.

"Adorable," he said again, lips again on my ear. "The foreskin means I don't need lubrication. Sometimes in the shower I might use it, but it's not necessary."

Holy fuck. I trembled as his breath spread along my skin, as my mind processed his forthright words. The _images_, oh the images they evoked …. I whimpered before realizing it.

"Bella, are you finding this conversation too much?" His voice was equal parts questioning and sultry.

"It's just, um, imagining anyone else doing that is really kind of a turn-off," I mumbled, hiding my face in his neck, "but when I picture you in the shower and you're, um –" I couldn't quite finish the sentence.

"Thinking of you." The voice was all sultry now, the fingers cupping a breast, thumb stroking a nipple so I jolted.

"Do you?" I whispered.

"Always of you." His hand slid, easily and surely, between my thighs. "And the reality is always better."

* * *

><p>Those sorts of nights meant that I spent my days in such a haze that the twisted barley sugar columns in the 18th-century Jesuit Church made me think not of Baroque gaudiness but of Edward's legs tangled in mine in the warmth of our bed. And the church's dome and oculus - trompe l'oeil, but spectacularly convincing – barely unnerved me. Edward had his arm around me, after all.<p>

Vienna was full of similar Baroque beauties and Hapsburgian excesses like the opera house, but also gorgeous buildings from the Vienna Secession at the turn of the last century, with their simple straight lines and sinuous curved ones. I loved them, and Austrian art of the era as well – as I discovered when we visited the Belvedere, a palace-turned-museum, where I saw Gustav Klimt paintings for the first time. I was fascinated by his luxuriant gardens and women who seemed to turn into waterfalls and rivers. Much of it was darkly erotic, making me think of lushness and twisted sheets.

"Why have I never heard of this guy? He's obviously crazy, but he's so compelling," I asked Edward.

"You seem to find everything from the period compelling," he teased me. "Klimt, the Secession, me…''

"And Rupert Brooke," I remembered, going on to tell him how the parallels of the poet's life and his had affected me so in London.

The comparison didn't please him. "He was a cad. I hope you have a higher opinion of my commitment," Edward muttered, then changed the subject. "You know, Klimt also died in the Spanish influenza epidemic," he said, coming to a stop before a portrait of a lovely young woman with a cloud of reddish hair framing her head. She looked a little uneasy at being on display, perhaps because Klimt had painted her surrounded by staring golden eyes. "Fritza Riedler, 1906," the wall label read.

"This has always reminded me of my mother," Edward said quietly. "Her hair, the shape of her face, the way she's holding her hands."

"You have your mother's eyes, Carlisle says. And her hair, too?" I asked, turning to him from the portrait.

"Yes, though hers wasn't quite this ... exaggerated," he said, running his hand through his own. "But my face is my father's."

"I wish I could have met them," I said wistfully.

An odd expression flashed across his face, but then the corner of his mouth curved up and he said, "You can."

I looked at him, baffled.

"You can," he repeated, his smile growing. "There is something I've been waiting decades to show you."

* * *

><p><em>AN: So, I'll have an explanation for why Edward is being so, um, hands-on here (as I wrote in my other story, I think canon Edward isn't meant to be a prude), but I'd be interested in hearing what you think._

_After you've done that, do check out the story I'm translating, Elysabeth's "Eyes of the Moon." I recently posted an amazing chapter, the one that made me ask Elysabeth to let me translate it._

_Art links on my profile page._

* * *

><p><em>Mr. Price here again. <em>

_Now, first off, let me say that I had no intention of adding any comments to this chapter. Because it is the last chapter, and the author should have the last word, right? Only, as it turns out, this isn't the last chapter after all, is it? And so, all bets are off._

_Regular readers of my commentary may recall that at the end of the previous chapter (once naively referred to by her many admirers as the "penultimate chapter"), I strongly suggested that lovely as Mrs. Price's descriptions of young love were, it was time for some lemons. Imagine my shock to learn that not only was the author no longer intending to wrap things up, she was not even going to provide any lemons. Instead, she was talking about something I had never heard of: a lime. It sounded like a lemon without any flavor (or, perhaps, juice)._

_But I have just finished the chapter, and though I think you will all agree that it would be nice if Mrs. Price would write a bit more quickly, it is not bad, not at all bad, though the digs at men may strike some – me – as a bit much. And for a lime, that was pretty steamy. Lemons are still promised for the next chapter. And dare we hope for a cumquat?_

* * *

><p><em>AN: Yeah, I can't believe he said that either._


	8. Chapter 8

_Disclaimer: I don't own "Twilight."_

_A special thanks to everyone who came back and reviewed the last chapter after FF had its little meltdown and wouldn't allow it. An extra-special thanks to Camilla, who posted a review at ADF. And of course, to Emmy, for sending PervPackers here._

_A few of you have noted the return of the electric blanket from "Getting Warmer." Sorry, I just can't seem to write about BxE messing around without thinking about how … impractical it is. My next story, I'm going to try to pretend that Edward isn't as icy/wintry/arctic/frigid as Smeyer keeps mentioning._

_I should also confess that not only is this story a big nostalgia trip for me, it's also my chance to rewrite a scene from "Eclipse" that I found particularly irritating._

_Also, I'm going to stop making claims about when this story will end. Suffice it to say, this isn't the last chapter._

* * *

><p>Chapter 8<p>

When we crossed into Switzerland, our passports were scrutinized by a border guard for the first time in our wanderings together. We had played hide and seek with the sun in Austria, Denmark and Germany (ah, Munich, see you some other time), with Edward happily racing along the speed-limit-free autobahns. As he had been in Venice, Edward was the best private tutor imaginable, pointing out the contrapposto of a figure or the unusual pediments in a facade while never saying too much, just giving me the detail that would fix the statue or building in my mind.

But even with his carefully unassuming tutelage, my German still wasn't of much use – I found myself answering German questions in Italian, so I confined myself to saying "danke," "bitte" and "mit Schlag."

And I just smiled nervously as the guard greeted me in German before peering at my fake French residency permit. He smirked, stamped an empty page in my passport, and waved us on.

"What was his deal?" I asked Edward as we drove west over the Rhine. "Was he suspicious about my documents?"

"No, he's wondering how I scored such a hot young babe. Since he finds me creepy and odd-looking, he has decided you must be with me for my money. Normally, that would rile me" - the corner of his mouth lifted – "but considering our history I have to be amused."

I gave him a dirty look, and asked, "Young? How old does he think you are?"

He handed a blue passport over to me. "Of course," I said when I studied it. "You're 25, to rent the car. Why is your name Edmund Fitzgerald?"

"A joke by Jasper," he grumbled.

"How is it a joke?"

He glanced at me and smiled. "That's wonderful. You're too young to have heard it."

"Heard what?"

"'The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.' The radio played it constantly in 1976. I despised it. I despised almost everything played on the radio in 1976, and Jasper knows it."

"I'll ask Jasper to teach it to me," I said gleefully.

"What? No!"

"C'mon, I have to be able to tease you about something."

"No, you really don't."

I shrugged, making no promises. "Hey, what's German for hot young babe?" I asked. Maybe that was a phrase I could manage, but my last few weeks trying to figure out German made me expect that it had about 20 syllables.

"Hot young babe. Some things just work better in English."

* * *

><p>Zurich was ... well, Zurich was jaw-dropping, what with the Alps and the lake, the exquisitely preserved medieval buildings and the dearth of skyscrapers. We got there on a brilliantly sunny day, and everything stood out in perfect, sharp relief.<p>

You'd think, considering whom I spent my time with, that perfection wouldn't make me uneasy, but it did. I almost felt too grubby for the city, in a way I no longer felt with Edward: after all, he showed me how much he wanted me every night and morning in ways I had never thought possible in my present state.

I wasn't sure, however, that Zurich wanted me. Still, I had become inured enough to luxury that I didn't bat an eye when we drove into a gated park surrounding a 19th-century villa in the Altstadt, the Old Town. It turned out to be the grounds of our hotel, and we handed the Audi over to the valet under the awning: in the perilous sunlight, the utility of a top-drawer hotel stood out in perfect relief, too. Our rooms overlooked the Schanzengraben Canal on one side, and Lake Zurich on the other.

"Nice," I said simply when Edward looked at me, daring me to complain.

This little victory encouraged him to push his luck. "Let's go dancing tonight," he said.

"Why in the world would we do that?" I asked as I flopped down on the bed, testing it out. Also nice. And even from here I could see the dark blue water of the lake.

"Because if we were in Forks we'd be at our senior prom now," he answered as he joined me.

"No. We. Wouldn't," I said, kissing his lips on each word, but still an unwelcome image of Jessica Stanley pouring herself into a strapless dress and ugly high heels popping into my head. "I've already met your statutory requirement of doing it once."

It was only later that I realized that his comment hadn't made me immediately think about why we weren't in Forks. Even the deepest cuts eventually start to heal for a human.

After some negotiation and persuasive return kissing, I agreed to a music club, and it wasn't anything like the Forks High prom. Dodging trams, we walked to a renovated warehouse in District 4, where a Swedish electronica band with mosquito netting around their heads sang in English, spoke to the crowd in German and performed songs that I had heard playing in shops and cafes in my time in Europe. The floor was crowded and so the dancing was thankfully limited, but even better was that Edward took the opportunity to discreetly feel me up when he knew nobody was looking.

Of course, that meant that we were primed to attack each other in the elevator up to our suite, Edward lifting me up and pressing me against the wall so that I, at least, was shielded from the security cameras. He turned on the electric blanket as he spun us onto the bed, grinding against me through our clothes until I felt that I was almost there, ready to arch under him.

But then he stopped and rolled away from me. "What?" I whimpered, panting and unhappy, staring at him in the moonlight streaming through a growing scrim of clouds and into our windows. "What's wrong?"

"I'm sorry, baby," he said. "This is too dangerous."

"No," I said, instantly on edge.

"I'm sorry, I mean that this particular activity is too dangerous. You could be hurt if we move against each other with too much force. If I could read your mind and know what your movements were going to be…" he said, but then reconsidered. "No, it's not something you think about. Lord knows, it's something that sometimes I'm shocked that I'm able to think about. … Here, I have another idea."

He encouraged me to get under the covers still in my jeans and shirt while he stripped off his. He curled up behind me, pulled my hair off my neck and buried his face in the crook there until I forgot my anxiety in the pleasure of the contact.

"God, you could get me to do anything when you do that," I confessed when he pulled his lips away.

"Even dancing?"

"Probably."

"I'll keep that in mind next time. But for now perhaps I can persuade you keep still while I do this…" he said as his hand molded around my breast over my thin top, my nipple sensitive to his touch. I moaned in frustration as I tried to stay unmoving.

"Good girl. Am I too cold?"

"No. You're perfect."

"I am far, far from perfect," Mr. Insecurities said, but moved his hand down anyway, over my covered stomach and then to the zipper of my jeans. A millisecond later his fingers were inside, moving over the cotton of my underwear while one arm immobilized my pelvis against his hips and the other snaked around to hold me against his chest. I could feel his erection nestled next to my ass, but was too trapped to rub against it. My captivity reminded me of being harnessed to a seat in a theme park ride.

Except that this was much bigger thrill than any roller coaster. His hands had long ago learned how to move on me so that I would linger forever at the edge of climax, whimpering helplessly, until I fell forever, but this time, his fingers made my release quick and sharp, and the sensation of climaxing while trapped was both freeing and agonizing. Unable to move as I would normally, I wailed instead, feeling the rumble in his chest as he groaned behind me.

A second later, I felt something cool and wet spread across my back. I giggled a bit even as I tried to catch my breath. There was definitely one thing about him that no number of electric blankets could warm up.

He let me go when I wriggled. Sitting up, I pulled my wet shirt off and looked down at him. "Look, Ma, no hands," I said, smirking and dangling my shirt from a finger. "You are so easy."

"You think so?" he said, staring at the cleavage I had just exposed to him in a way that made my heart start racing again. The appeal of boobs was eternal. At least I hoped so. "Give me your hand, and I'll show you the opposite of easy."

"You make bad jokes and you're incorrigible," I said, but I gave him what he wanted so I could nestle against his heated chest and touch him where he was indeed the opposite of easy. I was far, far from perfect, too, but he had shown me that I could be just what he needed.

* * *

><p>The experience was like the scene in "The Bourne Identity" when Matt Damon finds his stash of cash and forged documents in a Swiss bank safe-deposit box, but without, you know, the paranoia and shooting. The bank was frilly neo-Baroque outside, blandly luxurious inside; the room we were escorted to by a bank officer was nondescript; the steel box on the table in front of us had no bells or whistles, but was simply strong enough to withstand a fire or a bombing. And this banal-looking object was the most important reason for us to visit Zurich.<p>

"Are you -" I started, but Edward pressed a fingertip to my lips for several seconds before nodding. Okay, there was a little paranoia.

"Herr Kauffmann is gone now," he said.

" - going to show me a pile of laundered money?"

"No," he said smoothly. "Believe me, there's nothing inherently interesting in looking at laundered money."

I did believe him. We had dressed in our opera clothes for this visit, but while I still looked like the 18-year-old I was, especially with the braid I had put my hair in for comfort's sake on this humid, overcast day – and which I hoped he would enjoy deconstructing later - he came across as the 25-year-old his fake passport claimed for him. He looked as if he had seen plenty of piles of money in his time.

"But you do have money in a secret account in this bank," I guessed.

"Yes. We've had numbered accounts since before the war. The bank secrecy laws here make it safer to send funds to accounts in our other names. But it's not really laundering – and we do pay our taxes."

"That's good, considering how often you go to public school."

"Indeed," he said, his mouth twitching. "And I'm pleased to observe your interest in the disposition of our money. But wouldn't you like to see what's inside this box?"

I grimaced and fidgeted in my chair. "I'm a little nervous," I admitted finally. "I'm afraid that it's jewelry. Isn't that what people keep in safe-deposit boxes?"

"It's something better than jewelry," he promised me. "And far more dangerous."

That certainly piqued my interest. I watched him pull out the drawer of the steel box. Inside were a few small, plain wood square boxes, and several large envelopes. He pushed away the cylinder and set the envelopes in front of us.

"Ready?" he asked. I nodded impatiently.

The envelopes held sepia photographs of various sizes. "My mother," he said simply, handing one over.

The young Elizabeth Masen did indeed look remarkably like Frau Riedler in the museum in Vienna, in a white ruffled dress and sporting Gibson Girl hair, sitting solemnly in front of a studio's painted backdrop. Unlike Klimt's model, though, Elizabeth had a gaze that was steady and calm. Even as a young woman she looked like someone who could run a house or a store or a hospital without mussing her hairdo, much as her son could pin down a mountain lion without losing a button from his shirt. I started to touch her face with my index finger, then stopped, not wanting to damage the photo.

"She's lovely. And she looks so … competent," I said. "Or maybe organized is the word." I looked a few more seconds. "Or bossy." I wrinkled my nose at Edward. "You inherited that from her, too, not just her hair and eyes."

He ignored that. "My parents' wedding portrait," he said instead, handing me another picture. Elizabeth was older here, again in white, but standing, her hand resting on the back of an armchair in which Edward Senior was sitting. Like his son, he wore a suit well, though his had a celluloid collar and a complicated necktie. His mane of hair was dark blond and his eyes were probably blue, but what I noticed most were the strong jaw, distinctive eyebrows and high cheekbones he had passed down to his son.

The similarities to the man next to me were unmistakable, Elizabeth and Edward Senior combined into a lethal beauty.

"You take after your father, too," I observed. Looking at Edward Senior, I felt a pang for my own father: In our calls since Venice, Charlie hadn't shown himself to be any more enthusiastic about Edward than he had when I dropped my bombshell that "that boy" and I had reconciled. "Was there a boss in your family?"

"I think so. My father was intelligent enough to bow to a superior organizational ability - the ability you think I inherited," he reminded me pointedly. I shrugged. I didn't want there to be boss in our family.

"The resemblance is rather incriminating, and there's this," Edward added before handing me a few more papers.

"Cook County Certificate of Live Birth," read the top one. "Oh! It's for you," I observed after deciphering the spidery script. "You were born at home?"

"Many people still were then, even in Chicago."

Ugh. I shuddered at the idea of giving birth in, say, my bedroom or even the sterile space of Edward's house, then rubbed my finger over the handwritten notations, feeling the indents in the paper. "This is the original?" I asked, and he nodded. "You stole it."

"From the county clerk's office, yes."

"Is there a … death certificate, too?" I wasn't sure I wanted to see it if there was.

"No, I never officially died - I got lost in the chaos at the hospital. And after Carlisle and I took this, I never officially lived, either."

For the next photographs I had to jam a fist against my mouth to hold back my sudden sob. In one there was a boy of 5 or 6, hands poised on the keyboard of an upright piano, skinny legs protruding from short pants; in the next, the boy had grown into a long-limbed teenager who posed with his school track team, hair sticking up, in white shorts and a singlet bearing the letters NS.

"What kind of races did you run?" I finally managed to ask. Edward was watching me closely and seemed surprised by my question, but answered it anyway.

"With those spindly legs, no sprints. A miler? A distance runner, no doubt."

"How fitting."

The final photo was taken a few years later: he was nearly a man, in a tweed suit, standing with his schoolmates in the North Shore Prep Class of 1918, Winnetka, Illinois. They would all be dead by now, either in the war, or from the flu, or just old age.

They and their memories were all gone, but these pictures survived, all obviously and yes, dangerously, of the man next to me now.

"You were so handsome," I murmured, giving him a small smile.

He didn't smile back. "Do you regret that I can't be like him?" he asked quietly. I was confused for a moment before I realized that Edward was speaking about himself, his human self, in the third person, as if he were talking about a different creature. And I guess he was.

The words to answer him were quick to find. "He is handsome," I repeated, "but we're done with the angst, you and I, don't you think?"

"No," he said, taking my hand and drawing it up to his lips. Still looking in my eyes, he kissed the pulse in my wrist. "Not yet. This will still be hard, making this stop, even though it's what I want."

I nodded in acknowledgment. "You're right, but the rest is easy. l fell in love with these eyes." He let me pull away so I could stroke the faint shadows under the gold irises, then tapped his temple before moving my hand to his sternum. "And this mind. And this heart, no matter how it works. I don't want you to be anyone or anything else. Besides- " I pointed at the track team photo "- he might be an asshole jock."

Edward started to protest, then shrugged. "Maybe he was. I don't know."

But I'd still bet the girls all stared at him and fantasized about him back then, too, I thought. I decided to keep that little bit of jealousy to myself.

"I didn't realize that you had graduated," I said.

"Carlisle says that I had enrolled at Northwestern," he said. "But all I can remember is arguing with my mother about enlisting for the war. It's unfortunate that's my strongest memory of her." He stared at the wedding portrait on the table in front of him as if he was reliving what he remembered of their debates.

"Why did you say that you'd been waiting decades to show me these?" I asked him a few moments later, pulling him from his reverie.

"I've wondered, over the years, why I bothered keeping all this." He touched the pile of papers with a long finger. "I can remember them perfectly without ever seeing them again. And they are foolish to keep ... "

"The photos are indisputably of you," I agreed. "But they are safe here, don't you think?"

"Not as safe as they would be destroyed. Jasper has urged me a few times to do just that. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. And it wasn't until I saw that portrait in Vienna that I realized that I had kept them so you could see them. Even decades before you were born, I was waiting for you."

He was heartbreakingly romantic, but his words reminded me of the photographs I would never see again, and how I had longed for them when he had gone.

"You destroyed the pictures I had of you," I said quietly. It was a sore spot for me, that he had taken those from me, along with the travel vouchers from Carlisle and Esme.

"I didn't," he said. "They're hidden under your bedroom floor. Along with the CD I gave you, your present from my parents …"

I stared at him for a few moments, not sure how I felt about this. No, I did know.

"I was really pissed that you took the vouchers when I started planning my trip," I said.

"I was an idiot," he said simply. "I'm working on it."

It was unfair how easily he could disarm with a few words. I sighed out my remnants of anger. "You really are doing better on the controlling-bastard front," I agreed, thinking about our negotiations about dancing, "Though you were kinda controlling in bed last night –" I blushed even as I said this, remembering.

"You didn't seem to mind."

"You didn't seem to mind either."

He smiled and leaned toward me. "What I really didn't mind were the noises you made," he murmured into my ear, then tugged on my braid. "They were quite inspiring, you may remember."

He pulled away and I tried to get my bearings as I watched him put the papers and photos back in the safe-deposit box. Something was bothering me about that box, but I couldn't put my finger on it. Hormones had addled my brain.

* * *

><p>That afternoon, we visited one of the big art museums - the Kunsthaus Zurich, busy with visitors on this now-drizzling day - and looked at more paintings that were around Edward's vintage. There was an Henri Rousseau that stopped me in my tracks - not one of his usual jungle scenes, but a forest in fall colors. A woman in a red dress was in the foreground, alone and apprehensive.<p>

Edward noticed my stare, but said nothing of the picture's composition, nothing to help me remember it. Instead, he wrapped his arms around me from behind, unheeding of the people around us.

"That will never be you again," he said.

I relaxed against him. "I'm starting to know that."

* * *

><p>"Asparagus," I said and crawled up Edward's body. The sun was glinting off Lake Zurich, and we had got to a stage in our physical relationship where I'd put my mouth on him. He had proved quite easy … to please.<p>

His look of bliss turned to disgust. "I taste like asparagus? I'm sorry -"

"You taste like you smell." He still looked dubious, and I went on, "No, I just figured out why you reacted so oddly when I ate all that white asparagus in Vienna. It must look extraordinarily reminiscent of this. Why didn't you tell me?"

He looked guilty, then laughed, arranging the blankets around me now that I was lying next to him. "Because you liked asparagus and I didn't want to make you self-conscious."

"But I could have had so much more fun with it," I said, pouting.

"You had entirely too much fun with it without knowing what I was thinking. And then, when there was hollandaise sauce…" he trailed off and shuddered theatrically.

"Edward Cullen! Did you just make a blow job joke?" I couldn't help giggling. "You are such a 17-year-old."

"Hmm, I think it's more from living so long with Emmett."

I settled into him with a sigh, my cheek against his chest. Before my asparagus epiphany, he had put his mouth on me. I still wasn't quite sure how I had managed to survive the intensity of the feeling of his lips, his tongue, on my wet flesh. But I was willing to have a near death experience again if it meant another climax like that, and having him in my mouth had been unexpectedly arousing just on its own.

I shook myself. He and I needed to talk.

"Will we make love one day?" I asked into his chest.

"I would like that."

"Why?" I lifted my head to see his expression.

He looked taken aback, then sly. "Well, when a man and a woman love each other very much, they may decide -"

"Oh, stop. That's not what I meant. I always thought you felt it wouldn't be safe. In fact," I went on, flinching, and a little afraid of what I might hear, "I've been really … surprised at what we've done. Thrilled," I hastily added, "but surprised."

He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear, but his eyes grew unfocused. I waited. "I've been reluctant to mention this because it's somewhat unsavory," he said finally. "Do you remember the human woman the Volturi have?"

"Gianna, yeah?"

"Yes. Well, when we arrived and she saw Carlisle, her thoughts became quite … lively. In quite accurate detail."

"Ugh for you," I said in sympathy for all the mental porn he endured, then realized. "Wait, she knows Carlisle is a vampire. That means she -" I stopped, not quite sure how to phrase it. She sleeps with vampires? She makes love to vampires? Neither seemed right.

Edward saw I understood. "She does not lack for company in her bedroom," he said dryly. Well, that covered it nicely.

But I felt queasy, remembering what I had seen in that bedroom. "Edward, she has handcuffs attached to her bed! Do they force her -–"

"No," he quickly assured me. "She uses the cuffs on_ them_. Some of them like being vulnerable to a human."

"But the handcuffs don't really restrain them."

"No, of course not, but they enjoy pretending, to play at being submissive … just as rich and powerful human men keep dominatrices in business. " I wasn't quite sure what he was talking about, but I nodded, encouraging him to continue. "Which may explain why Gianna's most frequent supplicant is a very powerful vampire: Caius." Edward made a sound of revulsion. "He is so vile that I have no compunction about revealing his predilections."

"What does Gianna get out of this?" I had difficulty imagining anyone touching Caius for the pleasure of it.

"Unlike you, she does want to be one of them. She heard enough of your exchange with Aro to know you turned him down, and she was utterly baffled. Then she started thinking about Carlisle again."

"Ugh," I said once more. "She wasn't fantasizing about you?"

"She prefers blonds," he answered with a shrug.

"Does Carlisle know this?"

"He prefers that I keep my knowledge of other people's fantasies about him in my head and not put it in his."

This revelation was both greatly disturbing and really fucking interesting. Literally. "So," I ventured, "you think that if one of the Volturi can be with Gianna, then you can be with me?"

"I'd prefer not to draw such a direct connection, but yes."

I grinned widely.

And he narrowed his eyes at me. "You do remember there is a considerable difference between me and them?"

"It's easier for you because you're not a carnivore," I guessed.

"No, it's that they don't care if they harm Gianna. But I care very much about harming you."

"Poor Gianna," I started to say, but then stopped short. After all, Gianna did want to spend eternity slurping up humans.

"Poor Carlisle, more like it." Edward said. "And lucky me, because if he hadn't been with us, I might not have been given this insight into vampire-human relations."

"So the legend of the incubus is true," I observed, remembering the research I had done last year. I had hoped Edward was an incubus … without the evisceration and death, of course.

"The sex part, it appears, but not the impregnation one," he responded.

"Thank God. Otherwise, what would work against your super sperm?"

Shock flitted across his face, then he laughed loudly. "True. But don't say things like that in front of Esme and Rosalie. It's a sore subject for them."

"Noted," I said, before scrambling up and moving to straddle his hips as he watched me with a smile still playing on his lips. "We've had the contraception talk, so we're all set, then."

His smile vanished. "No. We … I shouldn't."

"But," I stuttered, "but why? What are we waiting for? Since Gianna showed you that it's not dangerous."

"It _is_ dangerous for us," he protested. "Those are vampires with a lot more experience than I have."

"I would imagine they do."

"Please, don't imagine it," he said, pained.

"But it's possible."

"Yes."

"So you don't … want to?" I said, confused, because that certainly wasn't the impression he had been giving me since Venice.

"No! I mean, no, I do, Bella. I want you. And I have to confess that the ways I want to make love to you are on a constant loop on one of my mental tracks ..." He trailed off

"Oh," I said, mollified to see him so distracted by the thought.

He shook his head and returned to the arguing-with-Bella track. "But I want us to be married first," he said.

I snorted. "You don't have to marry me to get into my pants."

He looked astounded at this, and I started to wonder if maybe he hadn't actually lived through the 1920s … or the 1960s… or any of the decades since.

"That's not why I want to marry you," he protested.

"Well, good, then," I said, leaning in for a kiss. Which was sweet, then urgent, then feverish until he pulled away as he had so frustratingly often before. He lifted me off him and set me to the side.

"What?" I huffed, pulling my knees up to my chest.

"I really do want us to be married first."

"I didn't realize you were so devoted to maintaining your virtue."

"Not my virtue, yours."

I gaped at him, and he went on, "I'm too far gone to worry about my virtue, but yours I can –"

"What?" I barked, finally regaining my powers of speech. "My virtue concerns only me, you troglodyte."

"Troglodyte?"

"Antediluvian, antebellum, atavistic …"

"I think you haven't seen enough films from the 1920's," he muttered.

"Superannuated…"

"You're adorable when you break out the SAT words."

"Victorian."

That one offended him. "I am not a Victorian," he said, looking wounded.

"Are too. She died in 1901. You probably inherited her transmigrated psyche."

He was silent. My irritation eased as I saw his distressed expression, and was replaced by shame. The last thing I wanted was to guilt him into deflowering me. I pulled my legs tighter into my chest and laid my head on my knees.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I feel as if I am trying to force a Jew to eat pork."

He shuddered. "Don't …. Don't say that. Pork is disgusting. Making love to you … is not."

"I just don't understand. You're so … uninhibited in so many ways. Why is being married so important to you?"

"I've lied, I've stolen and I've murdered. I could at least leave that one rule unbroken." He looked at me quizzically. "Why is being married not important to you?"

I shrugged. "I've never been one of those girls fantasizing about my dream wedding – surely you've heard them…" He nodded. "And Renee's told me plenty of times to wait until I'm 30 to tie myself down. I certainly wasn't planning to wait till I was 30 to have sex."

"Or 105." He gave me a small smile, one that reminded me just how incredibly long he had waited. For me. To show me the relics of his human life, to make love to me, to be tied to me. I could make him wait longer, and he would. But why would I want to?

I took a deep breath. "If you think God cares about when you lose your virginity, I can accept that. With more or less grace."

He looked delighted, but I raised my hand and went on. "So, will you admit that you want to preserve your virtue?"

"Inasmuch as it will preserve yours, yes."

He was being evasive, and I glared at him until he understood what I wanted from him.

"Okay," he conceded. "Your virtue is your business. And truly, I don't judge other people for not waiting. But, you have to understand, even if the idea of waiting till marriage is a holdover from another era, it's important to me."

"Okay," I conceded in turn. "But it does mean that you want to marry me so you can get into my pants."

"Wait, what? How did I become the villain in this conversation?" he said, feigning bewilderment.

I giggled at him. "Why do you want to get married?" I asked. "I hope there's more reason than that."

"There is." His expression turned mischievous and he tugged on my legs so I would lie down in his arms again. "There's the being in love and knowing you're perfect for me and wanting to be with you forever reason." He waved his hand dismissively, then his smile became wicked. "There's the I really do want to get into your pants reason."

_Please_, I thought.

"And when, someday, we go back to Forks –- and you know you'll want to, to see Charlie, before you can't -–" his face sobered, and he tightened his arms around me "- I don't want to have to sneak into your bedroom again. I don't want there to be any reason for us to be apart. We were apart for long enough."

My eyes dampened at his words, and he stroked my cheek. "Will you marry a controlling bastard trying to reform?" he asked softly.

The words were surprisingly easy to say. "I will."

* * *

><p><em>AN: As I said in my other story, I don't think Edward's meant to be a prude, just uptight about Bella's safety. And knowing Gianna's experiences means he can let loose, sort of. _

_I also think that Edward's entitled to believe that he shouldn't give it up until marriage (even though that's not something important to me). But, but! the way SMeyer has Bella agree that Edward's responsible for her virtue has always irked me. Why couldn't Bella simply respect his position without infantilizing herself?_

_Contrapposto: it refers to a figure with one leg bearing its weight and the other leg relaxed. Michelangelo's "David," which Bella compares Edward to in one of the books, is a classic example of that. (See, SMeyer did see Edward as uncircumcised.)_

_Mr. Price is grumbling over there – I made him see that band with mosquito netting. He's also groaning about my asparagus joke - this, from a man who made that kumquat joke last chapter!_

_Thanks for reading!_


	9. Chapter 9: EPOV

_Disclaimer: I don't own "Twilight."_

_I never thought I would do an EPOV. But a while back Sheeijan suggested I do one of the confrontation with the Volturi, and the idea started growing on me, abetted, I think, by my translating Elysabeth's EPOV for "The Eyes of the Moon" – and probably the usual difficulty of a writer in tackling that final chapter of a story. I am working on it, I promise, but in the meantime you can indulge in some retrospective angst before we return to our regularly scheduled fluff. _

_Thanks once more to Camilla10, and Mr. Price._

* * *

><p>Chapter 9: EPOV<p>

It was the plane ride from hell. My emotions were in such turmoil that Jasper, who had forsaken his preferred seat next to Alice to sit with me, was begging me to calm down; I was sapping his effort to stay unaffected by the scent of scores of sleeping humans trapped in a metal cylinder with recycled air. I watched him opposite me with a pang of guilt that was entirely self-generated, though he had copious guilt of his own: my actions had meant that he couldn't atone for what he had done last September, that he couldn't dull the vampire sharpness of his remorse by asking for forgiveness.

Esme and Carlisle were behind us, their thoughts a mixture of relief and worry. Alice was across the aisle, scanning the future and seeing only Bella sitting on a stalled train, staring out the window at a featureless landscape.

My only consolation was that she looked less hollow-cheeked and exhausted than she had in the previous images I had seen of her, images that had shown me what a fool I was. I already knew that I was a hypocrite and a liar.

* * *

><p>After I left Bella, I had taken some comfort in reliving her daily routine as if I were with her, a routine I knew to the second. She would wake up, sleepy and warm, limbs heavy, hair tangled, sheet creases on her cheek. She would yawn and stretch, look among piles of books for her slippers – she found the floors in Charlie's house unpleasantly cold in the morning – and shuffle off to the bathroom.<p>

Afterward she would go downstairs to check on the balky coffeemaker, then ascend again to dress for school. It was a quick affair: she would kick off the slippers and toss her T-shirt and sweatpants onto her unmade bed, exposing her beautiful skin to the chilly, damp air of Forks; shivering, she'd grab the jeans she'd left on the floor the night before, dragging them up the lines of her legs and over the gentle curves of her hips. Even before finding a shirt, she would get socks from her dresser to warm her feet, then clasp on a bra and pull on a T-shirt of some sort from one of the lower drawers.

I admit it: I lingered over this part of Bella's day. I had never seen it, but I had listened to it, and I could associate the sounds of her dressing to actions. I had heard the soft scratch of the denim against her legs, the fabric molding around the hips whose dimensions I knew perfectly, that I had felt pressed against me in her sleep. It was an exquisite torment.

I had heard the wool slipping over her delicate, unsteady feet. I had heard the meeting of the hooks and eyes in her bra as its thin cotton concealed her breasts. I had never seen them either, but I could clearly imagine their shape and weight, how they would fit in my hands. I had stared at them in the dark, and had felt them, too, pressed against me through our clothes as she slept. Bella would never know the liberties I permitted myself in the night, how I allowed us to touch in ways I wouldn't when she was awake. She wouldn't mind it, I knew, because of how disappointed she was when I moved away from her in the daylight.

She would pick up the brush on the top of her dresser then, gazing into the little mirror there that was losing its silvering. She would contemplate leaving her hair free, or putting it into a ponytail or a long braid over a shoulder. That braid drove me mad; I would stare at it all day in class, longing to loosen it, to run my hands through her hair, caressing her scalp, burying my face in the strands, letting their fragrance cloak my skin.

I had done that once, thrilled and overwhelmed by how she shuddered under my movements, how her scent changed as our skin made contact. I had pulled away my hands much sooner than I wanted. It wasn't just her reactions that unnerved me, but also my own, impulses to take and touch in ways that surely weren't safe: I knew that Tanya and Kate and Irina had killed many of their human lovers.

And Jasper had killed all of his.

Once I had caught him contemplating telling me that it would be different for Bella and me, because he had been driven by bloodlust and that lack of self-control which comes with the standard vampire diet. But he had decided against it. After all, God or Fate or a monkey typing on a computer on Alpha Centauri had decided it would be amusing to make it so that I fell in love with the one person whom my baser side most longed to drain.

Bella wore a braid the next day. I never touched it.

She probably thought I hadn't enjoyed the experience enough to repeat it, and I let her continue to believe that.

My lies had never bothered me so much before.

I would torture myself by picturing her braid bouncing as she went downstairs, greeted Charlie, poured herself a thermos of coffee, dropped a Pop-Tart into the toaster. She would gather her things for school, grab the disgusting food as it popped up, its chemical odor even more noxious heated, say goodbye to her father and head out.

I would be with her as she went to school in her truck, wincing as she drove with one hand while eating her breakfast. I followed her as she crossed the parking lot, as she said hello to schoolmates, as she sat down at her desk in the classroom, as she bit her lip in concentration during a quiz. I sat next to her at lunch with her friends, my thigh alongside hers as she chatted with them about homework, about movies to go see in Port Angeles, about plans for vacation, for college.

College. This gave me pause. She would worry about tuition. She shouldn't. I calculated the options. I made a call.

Now I could imagine listening to her debate which college to attend. Her grades and test scores would allow her to get into Washington or Florida, her essay would get her into a small liberal arts college, though not a top-tier one. She would require Cullen influence for that, and refuse to go to a school whose offer of admission smelled of it. I tried to stop myself from being such a hypocrite that I wished that she'd choose an institution like Notre Dame or Brigham Young, universities with strict rules and devout boys. I didn't succeed.

I would watch her with sympathy in calculus, and then in gym. I would watch her jolt as the last bell of the day rang and she gathered her things to leave. But perhaps not. Perhaps without a lovesick vampire sucking up all her time, she'd develop some interests, a hobby, an obsession that didn't involve dying and becoming part of a motley group of supernatural creatures.

She could join a school club. But none of them seemed right for her: the drama club, the choir, the volleyball team or the cross-country squad … It had once been one of my greatest pleasures to carry her as I raced through the woods, hurdling rivers and ravines just to hear her gasp.

That was a pleasure I would never experience again.

Instead, I would run along her truck as she drove to Newton's for her shift. Once I had set up her account, I indulged myself by imagining her quitting the job because she no longer needed to fatten her college fund, and to avoid Mike Newton's overtures.

Yes, I should have wanted Bella to be open, if not to Mike Newton's advances, to somebody else's, whoever might be worthy of her.

Yes, I was a blatant hypocrite.

Once she went home I would lean in the doorway of her kitchen and watch her cook dinner, flinching as she peeled and chopped. I had seen her one time make a pie for Charlie's birthday, and I liked to relive that, observing her focus as she cut butter into the flour and rolled out the dough, no sharp knives needed.

I waited outside as she and Charlie dined – my presence inhibited his appetite, I had found – but then I would linger at the table with her as she worked on her homework, wishing I could nudge her in the right direction on that calculus problem.

I would listen as she showered, picturing rivulets streaming down the slope of her shoulders and the vulnerable small of her back. I watched from her bed as she returned to her room, her skin even warmer and more fragrant than usual from the heat of the water. And at last I would stretch alongside her as she went to sleep, perfectly remembering the softness of her body against me, the movement of her eyes under her lids as she dreamed, the changes in her heartbeat and the spikes in her temperature that marked her nocturnal cycle.

And then morning would come to Forks, and it would start all over again.

Thus my days ran, with increasingly irritating interruptions from my family, who themselves were suffering from what I had told them was Bella's rejection of them, and who couldn't help thinking that I should try to win her back. When Alice got a glimpse of Victoria, I took the opportunity to leave Ithaca, and them, behind.

But my pursuit of Victoria was all too short, and when I found myself at a dead end in Rio, I simply curled up on the floor in a bland chain hotel in Leblon where everything was anonymous and automated, curtains closed against the beach view, and wallowed.

I left the room to hunt a few times, but eventually I couldn't bear to do even that, or to respond to my family's pleas to return. It was a problem I no longer had after Rosalie made a series of insulting and ill-timed - it was just as Bella was dressing for school - calls that made me crush my phone. I had no more distractions from Bella's daily routine.

Still, there was something I was unable to ignore: the devil of my desires whispering in my ear. _You don't have to just imagine her, you could go see her. Just to watch her from the shadows. Just to see if she's really all right. Just in case she needs you. Just to be her friend. Just to touch her once._

I couldn't.

The whisper grew ever louder.

I couldn't.

And louder.

Every minute, every second, it was harder to withstand the voice than the last.

I couldn't_ not._

Did I break? Or did I just finally come to my senses? No matter. The day arrived when I got up from the floor, walked outside, noted in passing that Rio seemed exactly the same in late March as it had in January even though I was fundamentally different, and got a cab to the airport. My passive desolation had been transformed into a burning impatience.

At the airport I bought a ticket to Seattle via too many cities for my liking, and saw myself clearly in someone's mind for the first time in months. The airline agent stared at me as I handed over a credit card - black eyes, shirt with permanent wrinkles from the floor - but otherwise unchanged from the day I left Bella. How could my inner agony make no mark on my exterior?

At least Bella would recognize me when she looked at me.

I couldn't wait to look at her. She would be in school when I arrived in Forks, and I spent the interminable hours of my journey north imagining my first glimpse of her, perhaps in the cafeteria, perhaps in gym, perhaps in history class. I could think of nothing else.

* * *

><p>But she wasn't there.<p>

She wasn't in history, nor was she in calculus 40 minutes later. I sat in my rented car outside the school, and searched minds, but nobody had her in his field of vision, or spoke about her, or even wondered where she was. No teacher looked at the attendance roster and noted that she was skipping class.

I drove the few blocks to the police station. Charlie's veiled mind wasn't there, but I heard a deputy tell a telephone caller that Chief Swan wasn't in because he was testifying in a case in Port Angeles. I listened long enough to determine that the case had nothing to do with Bella.

Bella's bank was across the street, and would close soon. I would have to work on Sharon Stanley.

Charlotte Gerandy was in her office, so Sharon Stanley was alone behind the teller's counter, protected by plexiglass, shellacked curls bent over a computer screen, too preoccupied with reconciling accounts and thinking about dinner to notice my presence at first despite the buzzer on the door that rang as I walked in.

"Mrs. Stanley," I said as pleasantly as I could. She looked up, startled, and gave a little shriek. A second later, the mental floodgates opened.

_Oh my God, the Cullen boy is here back from … wherever. Wait until I can tell Denise. I'll call her when he leaves. Is the doctor here too? He's so handsome. This one is weird. Jessica had such a crush on him. Mike's better but this one is much richer. Are they moving back? Why is he here? Denise will be so jealous that I saw him. Why is he staring? Fuck, it's my turn to talk._

"Um, Edward Cullen, right?" she said, plastering on a bright smile. "How nice to see you again. Are you in town for a while? Can I help you with something?"

I sighed imperceptibly, and the faux wood-grain laminate of the counter crackled under my fingers. _Yes, you can think about Bella, dammit. Is that so difficult? _"Yeah, I'm in town for a bit, and I wanted to see if I could reopen my account?" I asked in my teenager's voice. Before I left, I had had an account here, with a negligible amount of money, that I had never used. With faked tentativeness, I recited the account number.

"Lemme see," Sharon Stanley said, turning her eyes back to her computer screen, away from me, with a mental sigh of relief that she didn't stop to analyze. _Wait until I tell Denise, wait until I tell Denise…_

I was going to have to prod her. "Is Chief Swan still in town?" I asked casually, but a triumphant, malicious little smile flitted across her face. _Hah, he's probably worried about Charlie gunning him down for what he did to that girl._

She looked up at me. "He is," she said, while her mind's eye showed Bella. Finally.

And it was like having an arm ripped off. Sharon Stanley saw a Bella who was exhausted and shadow-eyed, undernourished … and livid for reasons she couldn't understand. She also remembered trying to eavesdrop on a conversation between Bella and Charlotte Gerandy behind the manager's door and failing, Jessica telling her that Bella had dropped out of school and Charlie Swan looking so dour that she didn't dare ask where his daughter had run off to.

She didn't know where Bella was. And I was such a fool.

I barely managed to keep my shock hidden behind my mask of teenage indifference. "I'll tell my dad," I mumbled. "I'm sure he'll want to see the chief again."

"Of course," she said, trying to conceal her disappointment at my lack of a reaction. _Well, I can tell Denise that he wasn't interested in Charlie's girl at all. Out of sight, blah blah._ "I'm afraid that you'll need to fill out some paperwork to reopen your account, and provide ID again. Do you want to do that now?"

"Oh," I said, scratching the back of my neck and playing disappointed myself. "I don't have anything on me."

"Sorry, Edward," Sharon Stanley said with insincere sympathy. "Rules are rules. And I'm closing up soon." _Thank God_, she said to herself.

"I'll have to come back later, then," I said.

I would come back, but Sharon Stanley wouldn't be here.

* * *

><p>I left my car at our empty house, my tires crushing the wet ferns that had sprung up in our absence, then made my foray into the bank, too impatient to wait for darkness to cover my felony. But it was almost all for naught: though Charlotte Gerandy's scribbled list of passwords was laughably easy to find, all I discovered was that Bella had set up a regular transfer of money from her account to Washington Mutual. Where it went beyond that was a job for Jasper.<p>

That left one more place to go.

The wind at my back seemed to push me to Bella's house. Jumping up to her bedroom seemed as natural and familiar as breathing for a human. The window still opened soundlessly. Her furniture was still arranged as I remembered. But the room seemed alien, too neat, no clothes or books on the floor, no slippers by the bed, which was neatly covered with its purple duvet. Her brush was gone, though her closet and dresser were still filled with her things.

Charlie had kept the room shut up, and her fragrance remained, too, fainter, but potent. I breathed in deeply, staggered by my pleasure in having even this one-sided physical contact with her. How had I considered Bella's scent a torture? Fate may have mixed up a perfume uniquely designed to taunt and tempt me, but it was still an incredible gift, a reminder of what we had had … and then I realized that the perfume hadn't made the familiar flames erupt in my throat. My thirst was dormant.

And that was something I would have to consider later, because I was being summoned from the forest. My name, a demand that I leave the house or be removed from it, the curious mixture of human and lupine thoughts. I was suddenly very glad that Bella had left Forks, for I recognized what volatile creatures awaited me in the woods.

Still, their appearance nearly made me laugh: five Quileute, two in wolf form, three in human, all bare chests and bare legs. It was as if I was being confronted by a particularly foul-smelling boy band and their even fouler-smelling oversized pets. A boy band that could destroy a lone vampire, I knew, but I couldn't repress my irritation at being torn away from Bella's house.

"What business do you have with me?" I said curtly, without a greeting, to their apparent leader. I didn't know his name, but I could guess it from the small stock of surnames on the reservation. I did know the boy to his left, though he had grown several inches since I had seen him last at the Forks High prom: Jacob Black, to whom I would always owe a debt for being skeptical and indiscreet. What I didn't know was why the descendant of a chief was deferring to someone else.

"What business do you have here?" the leader asked me instead of answering.

"That's no concern of yours. This area is not forbidden to me under the treaty." I eyed the leader - Sam, I gathered from the mental yips. "I can recite it to you if you need. I was there when it was written."

Sam didn't make the effort to dispute that. Instead he said, "One of your kind was in town recently, and we've had to make this part of our patrol area." His mind - all the minds – showed me Laurent, with murderously red eyes, and I was even more grateful that Bella had left.

"Do you know why he was here?" I asked, more for the images my questions would provoke than for what Sam would answer.

"Perhaps he was looking for you, since we suspect he was at your house. You Cullens cause trouble even when you're gone. We took care of him when he crossed onto our land," Sam said without elaborating, but I could see pieces of Laurent being tossed into a purple bonfire. Good. The dogs at least remembered how to do their job.

"You know my family doesn't harm humans," I reminded Sam, but he glared at me.

"You ditched the human girl you seduced and left her defenseless in the woods," he spat out, and this time I couldn't hide my reaction: I recoiled at Sam's memory of picking up a catatonic Bella from the forest floor in the dark.

How could she have become so lost? No, that wasn't the right question. How had I screwed up so much that a _fucking wolf_ had to find her?

I was a colossal fool.

"I – I didn't mean for that to happen," I whispered as my back pressed into a fir tree – without realizing it, I had retreated from Sam as if the distance could protect me from his mental images. My pride before the shifters vanished. "I need to find her. Do you know where she is?" A stony silence greeted me, and I pressed on. "Jacob? You know Bella. Can you tell me?"

Jacob shuddered, though his mind spoke volumes: Bella, drawn and determined and beautiful in his eyes, talking about the Tower of Pisa as Super Bowl commentary played in the background, then a memory of a scattering of postcards from Europe on Charlie's refrigerator. He couldn't remember what the pictures on them represented, but he visualized them enough so that I could recognize the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum and the dome of the Pantheon, images that suggested an aesthetic interest and taste for travel that Bella had never mentioned to me. And that I had never asked about.

I had been too focused on the dangers of the present, and she had been too focused on the problems of the future, for us to have talked about such things.

But Jacob concentrated more on what was written on the back of the postcards: Bella's assurances that she was eating and sleeping. With the subtext that she hadn't been eating and sleeping before she left. I wondered if she was lying to Charlie just as I had lied to my family.

"She dropped out of school because of you," was all Jacob said.

"You dropped out too, dude," muttered the third member of the boy band before Sam cut him off with a "Shut it, Paul."

"We don't have any information for you, and I don't care what the treaty says," Sam continued. "Charlie Swan doesn't want you in his house after what you did, and we're not going to allow it. And the numbers are on our side."

I didn't bother to acknowledge the obvious truth of that, and spun away at a run to my family's house. The dogs had nothing to give me, and I had no more time to give them. They tailed me to the treaty line, then stopped still, their snarls and pants fading behind me.

I got into my car and headed north, since there was little point to remaining in Forks. I would have to rely on my usual means to find Bella. Alice would be ecstatic.

And I would have to come to terms with the realization that the days I had passed living through Bella vicariously had been a fraud. I had spent months imagining a life for her that she had long ago cast off.

That was how it always was with Bella. She hadn't done what I had expected her to do.

She had taken the money and run with it.

Good for her.

* * *

><p>Alice seemed to answer even before I finished composing her number on the phone I bought in Port Angeles. "Thank God. I lost you there for a few minutes. We'll meet you at Kennedy," she said in her way, a lightning switch from relieved to peremptory. "She's in Rome, but will be in Naples, goodness only knows why with the garbage, when we land. Go grab something to eat before you get on another plane - that's an order from Carlisle -."<p>

I started to protest, wanting to do this on my own, wanting to postpone my day of reckoning with my family, but Alice forestalled me. "We should be with you. We want to, in case you need us for ..." She trailed off, then added, her voice softening, "She sent us away. She sent _you_ away. What if she says no?"

* * *

><p>I followed the letter of Carlisle's order, but not the spirit, and he disapproved of my still dark eyes when we had our muted reunion at Kennedy, all of us trying to avoid the international terminal's overabundance of skylights. He said nothing, though, and hugged me silently.<p>

"I know I was impossible to live with," I said by way of apology.

"And without," Esme said softly, demanding her own hug.

Alice handed me a new shirt, and new information. "She's going to Florence now," she said, her mind showing me Bella in a train car. I clung to this vision as we made our way through the express security line and waited to embark.

Now we were heading east, and to ease Jasper's nerves I tried to soothe my own by indulging in a variant of the pastime that had occupied my hours since September. I tried to imagine Bella in Rome, sleeping at the hotels I knew, the Russie or the Hassler, eating at restaurants that I had only glanced into, climbing ruins in the Forum, examining Raphael's Cupid and Psyche murals at the Villa Farnesina. Would she see the parallels to our own story? After all, I was like that stupid immortal boy, fleeing the woman he loved and leaving her to suffer because one little thing had gone wrong. One drop of oil from Psyche, one drop of blood from Bella.

But the knowledge that she wasn't sleeping or eating because of what I had done wouldn't allow me to sink into my fantasy. I kept rerunning the images of her from Sharon Stanley's memories, and worse, from Sam the dog. Tired and angry. Lifeless and broken.

Behind us, the other passengers were roused from their awkward sleep, given the airline breakfast we had refused. I closed my shade against the sun shining above the clouds as the plane banked.

My mind returned to Alice's vision, to the improvements in Bella's appearance. Perhaps Bella hadn't been lying about sleeping and eating better. Perhaps getting away from Forks, having this new adventure, had made all the difference. I now imagined Bella walking in narrow streets like the American girl in the famous Ruth Orkin photograph being ogled by Italian men. Bella had insisted to me that she passed through life unobserved, but that had not been my experience. Perhaps on this trip she had met someone cheerful and uncomplicated, a quick-tongued Brit or a charming Italian, someone who could tell a joke, someone who could share a meal and a bottle of wine with her, who could bring her pleasure without fear of hurting her or making her shiver. Someone who could help her forget me …

_"Edward!"_ It was Alice, and I watched a movie unroll in her mind. Scene 1: Bella getting on a bus. Scene 2: Bella in a dim stone-walled chamber, in the middle of a crowd of dazed foreigners. Light from an oculus highlighted her as a figure in a dark cloak seized her. His hood fell back as he leaned down to her throat.

I didn't recognize him, but Carlisle had described these vampires and this setting to me. And to Alice too, apparently. She twisted in her seat and hissed at Carlisle, "Bella is going to Volterra." A flight attendant headed our way to make sure we were buckled in for the landing backtracked, made uneasy by the ferocity in Alice's voice.

He looked startled. "Of her own volition?"

"No."

For the long unbearable minutes, I sat frozen in my seat as Alice flipped through scenarios like someone going through a milk crate of vinyl records. At one moment Scene 2 replayed, at the next it went black, giving us hope. Then the plane touched the ground and I sprang up, unheeding of the warnings in Italian and English from the flight attendant, of her worry that she would have to summon security_. "We will never get out to Bella if the carabinieri stop us because you're behaving erratically,"_ Esme warned me. I dropped back down, trying to hold on to my sanity with the knowledge that we'd be the first passengers off the plane.

It was when we were in the passport line that a new film played for Alice. Scene 1: Bella gathering her courage and standing up from her seat to go talk to her vampire bus driver. Scene 2: The driver draining her in front of a group of oddly passive passengers.

"Heidi," I whispered in horrified recognition from Carlisle's memories, and he swore softly. "Bella's confronting Heidi."

"No, it's actually better - Heidi's changed her mind," Alice said, and now a Scene 3 unspooled: Bella as the sole human in the stone-walled chamber, vampires staring at her in puzzlement.

In danger and alone, but alive.

* * *

><p>"Carlisle and I should go," Alice announced after we made it through passport control and were striding as quickly as we prudently could in the direction of the car she saw we could steal. Esme and Jasper looked alarmed by this but Carlisle nodded.<p>

"We cannot rescue her by force, only persuasion, and they will feel less threatened with fewer of us," he agreed, and no one could argue with that, since he was the only one of us with experience. But I could see that Alice and Carlisle also didn't want to expose their mates to the Volturi.

"I'll drive," I said but my sister and father shook their heads.

"You shouldn't come either," he said.

"I'm not -" _going to be irrational_, I was going to say, but Carlisle raised his hand.

"We have secrets to keep, and I know Aro - he will do anything he can to get them from us," he said, an image of a wolf flashing in his mind as we walked out of the terminal. After my encounter in the woods with the pack, I didn't particularly care at the moment about keeping the treaty, but he was right: if Aro took hold of my thoughts, it would be a betrayal of everyone I had ever met. "He won't let us leave without touching you or me or Alice," Carlisle added.

"And you have the least experience of all of us in hiding your thoughts from a mind-reader," Jasper observed.

"I have to be there," I said simply, and Alice sighed.

"There's no point arguing," she said, seeing me unshakable on this. "But, Edward, Carlisle needs to do all the talking, even if the Volturi provoke you. And he should drive while we watch Bella. We'll take the coast route. It'll be faster today."

From the cramped back seat of a dusty yellow Porsche, I stared at the stretches of the Tyrrhenian Sea, dull under the gray sky, at the promontory of Monte Argentario jutting out into the water. But all I saw was what was in Alice's head. The images were sharp but unilluminating: a highway sign, a turn, Bella alone. I begged God, Fate and that monkey on Alpha Centauri to let us have a chance to save the woman I had abandoned. Then at last, as we were still many switchbacked miles away, Heidi decided to park the bus in the piney hills above Volterra instead of taking Bella directly to the Volturi complex. That gave us time: Alice suddenly saw us in that stonewalled chamber with Bella. Which didn't mean we would be able to get her out of it.

* * *

><p>Getting in was surprisingly mundane - a grate in a damp alley, a drop that would break a human, a wooden door with an outdated camera intercom into which Carlisle said his name - but the images I saw as we waited for entry were not. We could hear nothing of what was going on, but dozens of vampire minds showed me Bella, terrified but brave, giving a highly edited and misleading version of her encounter with James – "She's lying to protect us," I murmured, and Carlisle nodded as if to say, "Of course."<p>

Then Aro set Jane on her.

I gouged the door trying to push it open as Carlisle and Alice struggled to hold me back. The door stayed intact, proof that it had been built to be both soundproof and impregnable even to vampires. But that wasn't what ended my assault: Bella, too, I saw, was impregnable to that hideous vampire child.

And Aro's mind finally came into sharp focus. He was thrilled. This inconvenient human girl appeared to have some very convenient talents worth cultivating. Aro had a wife, but he imagined one of the unmated vampires in his guard courting a red-eyed Bella, initiating her into vampire ways, including the most intimate … Demetri or Felix wouldn't mind if he watched …

I started to tear down the door again, but I was arrested by what I saw next. Aro had made his decision about what to do with Bella, but he wanted to provide his vampire audience a bit of theater and give the human the illusion of choice: did she want to die, or become immortal?

Her answer devastated me –- after so many arguments, so many pleas to be changed, she preferred death to being like me? – and it disconcerted Aro enough that he was grateful for the interruption by the human woman Gianna bearing news of our arrival.

He sent Heidi and Bella away, and I concentrated so narrowly on homing in on the Volturi lure's mind that I barely registered the click of the door letting us in, the human woman's stupefaction over Carlisle's beauty as he walked past her desk, the avid faces and vicious thoughts of the vampires awaiting us, Aro's elaborate greeting and Caius and Marcus's more restrained one to their old companion, even Bella's fresh scent in the audience hall. I tore my attention away from Heidi and Bella only when Carlisle started pleading to be allowed to take Bella home.

"I realize this is an unorthodox request," Carlisle went on, "but I would hope that considering our long friendship, Aro …." My father had no ulterior motive other than to remind Aro of their years together, but Aro's guilty mind unknowingly confessed to me: for a startled moment he wondered if Carlisle knew about what Aro considered an unforgiveable deed, his murder of his sister and Marcus's mate.

He dismissed the idea in an instant, but nonetheless jerked his head toward a guard, giving a silent order; he knew that Bella's recent presence in the room made it impossible to hide her from us. Still, Caius launched into a long disquisition on the importance of secrecy and obeying vampire law. "What makes you think we have this girl, a girl who by your own admission of her knowledge of us shouldn't be alive?" he eventually asked.

Aro rolled his eyes, while Carlisle was so taken aback by Caius's implied lie that he started speaking heatedly in English. "Of course we know she's here, Caius, her scent is –" Carlisle stopped as a new wave of the scent in question reached us all.

Heidi pulled Bella into view and I at last got to see her with my own eyes. She was pale. She was exhausted. She was beautiful.

She wouldn't look at me.

My sins kept my feet rooted to the floor as Carlisle darted over to support her swaying form. "Bella, you are all right?" he asked her softly. "We'll take care of you, sweetheart. Just bear with us a few moments."

She nodded at him gratefully and thanked him, and his mind burst with joy at her obvious relief at seeing him, at her comfort at being in his arms. Even Carlisle, used to being trusted by humans, had easily believed my lies that Bella was afraid of us. His elation made my chest twist.

But not as much as Aro's request that Carlisle be the one to change Bella.

"No," I rasped out despite my promise to be silent, and Carlisle's shoulders slumped infinitesimally. "_Edward_," he warned, as Caius gleefully noted my objection, then offered to kill Bella himself. His contemplation of her murder was terrifying.

I started to move to Aro, to show him that if Bella chose it, I would be the one to change her, and if she didn't, we would fight to extinction to prevent any member of the Volturi from touching her - "No," Alice said firmly as she cut in front of me on my way to the throne. "_No, Edward, you promised not to do this._"

Aro didn't know any better, and so was just as happy at first to get Alice's memories as mine. My talent didn't work like his, so I couldn't see what Alice told him and what she was able to keep hidden.

But I was able to see that he was shocked and horrified by what I could do. Though he now knew I could hear him, he couldn't help trying to figure how to get rid of me so he could keep Bella and his secrets, then imagining how he could have us both in his guard, and Alice too, by manipulating Bella into protecting him from my mind-reading. That would come later, though: for the moment he wanted me out of range as soon as possible. "_If you want me to grant your request_," he thought, his eyes narrowing at me in warning, "_you'll keep silent, Edward Anthony Masen Cullen._"

Ah, he realized that I knew about his sororicide, that he had given me information to blackmail him with. I might pay for this dangerous knowledge some day, but for now I was as eager to leave as he was to get rid of me. So I nodded minutely, and Aro's spoken words were all of delight over his discoveries from Alice's thoughts, about Carlisle's family, about Bella's future as a vampire. The delight held a sting aimed at me.

"She clings to Carlisle, but is not his pet," Aro told Caius as if confiding a secret. "She is his son's. His shameful obsession. _You are an idiot, Edward Cullen. You don't deserve her. Any member of my guard would be better for her than you._"

My growl in response alarmed Carlisle into beseeching the Volturi for an immediate dismissal, which Aro granted over Caius's objections.

"I'm disappointed that you're departing so quickly," Aro said, lying through his gleaming white teeth, before adding, "I'm so looking forward to seeing just how well Isabella turns out."

That wasn't a lie, but a threat.

* * *

><p>Gianna was still at her desk. She looked at Bella as we approached, her thoughts reflecting amazement that someone would turn down Aro's offer of eternity. Then her gaze traveled to Carlisle's right hand around Bella's shoulder, and her mind went down a quite different path. I drew in a sharp breath, and while Bella's eyes remained on her feet, Carlisle's and Alice's eyes shot to my face.<p>

The scenarios Gianna was imagining were nothing I hadn't seen before many times over, but the actors were novel. There was Caius supine on Gianna's bed, his wrists in cuffs attached to the posts, whose finish had been worn away by friction. Then Carlisle's face replaced Caius's, the details of his naked body hazy, as the human caressed his cold skin and he begged her to bring him to release. Other faces flashed in her mind as she envisioned rocking over a bound Carlisle, other faces with red eyes, their bodies shrouded in electric blankets or warmed by her shower. Then this fantasy Carlisle broke the cuffs with a twist of his wrists and rolled Gianna to her back, touching her in ways I had never dared touch Bella. There was no fear in her thoughts, no memories of being hurt, only the thrill of having dangerous creatures in her power, even if it was all play-acting.

Perhaps Jasper was right. His experience didn't have to be mine, I could -

"Edward?" Carlisle asked quietly.

"You don't want to know," I assured him, and he winced in understanding born of long experience, darting a glance at Gianna before turning to Heidi, who was approaching us rapidly from behind with Bella's backpack and bag. Heidi couldn't help the menace in her purring goodbye, despite the grudging respect she had developed for the human girl who had ruined her plans. Bella nodded an acknowledgment to her before contemplating the floor again.

Why wouldn't she look at me, even once?

Instead she sagged against Carlisle, and once again I envied him for his ability to touch her, just as I had when he examined her in the hospital in Forks after the van crash. It killed me to see her so easily accept from him comfort that she so obviously didn't want from me.

As we made our way out of the Volturi complex, I whispered to Alice and Carlisle what Aro had been thinking, about his plans for us, why he had let us go. Carlisle was appalled.

But Bella had no reaction. I wondered if she was suffering from shock, and I longed to wrap her in my arms and promise her she would be safe from now on. We would go back to Forks, away from Aro and Caius and Jane. We would start over again. I would beg her forgiveness. I would beg her to let me touch her. I would beg her to give me forever, with everything that entailed.

"I'm not going home," Bella mumbled when we were on the Piazza dei Priori, the clock tower casting no shadow today, halting Carlisle and me in our discussion of routes home. Her eyes finally settled on my face. Finally.

And I could see that she wasn't in shock. Instead, her eyes were full of anger, hurt ... and contempt. I had never seen her look at me that way before, as if I had insulted her.

"There's nothing for me back there," she said, her voice stronger. Decided. Determined that I understand her. Next to me, Alice began scouting out another car to steal, and my heart broke.

"Bella –" I started, but she cut me off. Her refusal to listen to me was clear.

She turned away from me and I choked back the words of persuasion that she had told me once would have lured her out of our classroom and into her death at my hands. I couldn't trick my way back into her life.

She asked Carlisle to take her to Florence, and for my sake he tried to tamp down the happiness he felt again at her trust in him. I trailed behind them as he guided Bella to the car Alice had found, staring at his hand on her waist, remembering how that curve had felt under my fingers. She slipped into the passenger seat without looking at either me or Alice.

"Are you sure?" I heard Carlisle ask her, and I saw her nod.

No, this wasn't happening. I couldn't let her go.

I didn't know that I had smashed my fists into the trunk of the car until Alice yanked me away. "Edward, stop," she pleaded, trapping me in her arms but making it so the gesture would look like a hug to the casual observer. She glanced over my shoulder, and I realized that a line of curious faces were staring at us from a bar across the street, and making unnervingly accurate speculations about our nature. The Volturi were perhaps not as discreet as they thought.

I was also realizing too late that my silence and restraint had merely confirmed for Bella what I had told her when I left her. Even the one word I had spoken in the Volturi audience hall was a rejection.

Then I heard a question in stereo, one from the mind of my sister, one from the man who was driving Bella away from me. "_Edward,_" they asked, "_what did you do to her?_"

"I did everything wrong," I whispered, and Alice's face darkened as she foresaw what I would recount to her of the lies I had told Bella and my family, lies that explained why her best friend wouldn't talk to her. Still, she let me collapse onto her, her small frame my crutch as I convulsed with dry sobs of despair, of self-loathing ... of loss.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Edward in the kitchen watching Bella? That's Mr. Price watching me cook. That's why Mr. Price always makes dinner._

_Art links on my profile page. Thanks for reading!_


	10. Chapter 10

_Disclaimer: I don't own "Twilight."_

_Thank you to everyone who asked how Mr. Price and I fared with Hurricane Sandy. We were very lucky: no flooding, no blackout. But there are plenty of people still in dire straits, so please keep them in your thoughts and checkbooks. _

_Merci to Ely for technical assistance and grazie to Camilla10. _

_Recap: When we last left BxE, they were in Zurich, where they visited a safe deposit box; Edward revealed that Gianna had treated him to a smutty slideshow in Volterra; and he asked his favorite question. _

_The bits of French will be translated at the end. I warn you, this is a complete nostalgia trip for me._

* * *

><p>Chapter 10:<p>

We stopped just outside Paris, on a quiet street in Neuilly, the town that was listed as my home on the faked residency permit in my passport. There was a park on one side of the street, a row of gated century-old town houses on the other.

"We're not staying here, right?" I asked, peering through the Audi's windshield before looking back at Edward. He had told me that we had reservations at an old, luxurious (naturally) hotel in Paris proper that had an awning to shade us on this sunny day. Which meant we'd be spending some quality time inside said old, luxurious hotel.

"Right, but since you were curious about your real estate holdings -" he smiled slyly as he reminded me of my sarcastic question in Vienna about my putative French residence "- I thought I should show you one." He nodded toward a building in creamy stone, with wrought-iron balconies and a mansard roof. The gate to the front garden was open, with men in coveralls carrying buckets inside. "We're doing some work on the interior, which helps explain why we're not staying there."

I didn't think that Edward was pulling my leg, but the idea that I "owned" this villa was so unreal that I could look at it dispassionately.

"It looks very peaceful here," I said.

He grimaced. "You would think that, but some of the most reviled people on the planet live on this street," he said, pointing out the homes of an arms dealer and a security chief in a fallen African dictatorship. "So my family thought we'd all fit right in."

"You are not comparable to -" I started to protest.

"Most people would be repulsed by our roaming the forests and draining large animals," he pointed out, and I subsided. After all, the idea that I would be doing that one day, and soon, made me queasy. Though I knew the alternatives remaining to me were unspeakably worse – and that was without taking into consideration what Edward had told me of Aro's designs on us, how he wanted to manipulate us for his benefit.

"Since the residents of this street don't want anyone knowing their business, they don't poke their noses into anyone else's," Edward went on. "And the location is convenient, both to Paris and places to hunt. But the drawback is a surprising amount of violence. Which is another reason you're not staying here."

"Like what?" I said skeptically.

"_Like_, in 1980, when we were all here, an assassination squad came looking for the exiled Iranian prime minister, killed one of his neighbors, and shot a policeman. We were forced to negotiate a police cordon to get out and hunt."

"Okay, but come on, that was a long time ago, before I was even born."

"The assassins came back to finish the job in 1991_, after_ you were born," he said. "Not long ago enough. Though I have since learned Arabic and Persian in case a similar situation arises again."

I thought about that a moment before understanding. "Would you have stopped the shooting if you could have?" I asked.

"Not for the morality of it, but to insure our safety, yes." He looked at me somberly. "As I told you before, we are not superheroes."

"I know." I would have to learn, as the Cullens long ago had, that discretion was sometimes more important than principles, but that didn't mean they had to consider themselves soulless monsters. "I also know that you don't deserve to be reviled."

His smile was rueful. "You have an eternity to try to convince me of that," he said. "But now, it's time to see Paris."

* * *

><p>Edward's gift had made him so nonjudgmental about sex that asking him about mechanics was easy. My deeper worries, the ones that no other woman would ever have, were more difficult to broach.<p>

"Is hibited a word?" I asked him that night as we floated (or more accurately, I floated, and he anchored me) in the capacious Jacuzzi in the hotel we were staying in on the Avenue George V, not far from the Champs-Elysées. While the hotel itself wasn't to my taste – Edward conceded that it was overstuffed and overdecorated, but insisted that the location was ideal – the infinity tub in this suite was phenomenal, deep enough to warm Edward to his neck and with sufficient bubbles to provide me a certain degree of modesty.

"No. Why?" He idly popped a large bubble that had formed above my torso.

"I'm trying to think of the opposite of inhibited."

"Vampire." It was said as a joke, but I guessed that his answer was based on a lot of experience with his family.

I twisted my neck around to gaze at him. "Well, whatever the word is, you are it."

"Uninhibited," he said, then frowned, contemplating this. "Not having much experience in the matter, I don't know that I am," he said after a moment.

I gave him a significant look, thinking of our last weeks together, and he finally grinned in understanding. "I guess we're finding out, aren't we?" I had to snort in agreement, and he continued, "What I can say is that I've heard a lot."

"You've heard a lot of people thinking about the first time they had sex," I said, settling down against him again.

"It is a hazard of attending high school and college repeatedly, yes."

"What's it like, generally?"

"_Generally_," his voice still had a smile in it, "I'll come early and you won't." I was a little dubious about this answer, since this hadn't been my experience so far, and unsurprisingly he continued, "We'll have to see what we can do about that last part."

"What about the first part?"

"That's not a problem," he said dismissively. "There's no waiting period for me." He nudged my hip, and the feel of him hard against me made his meaning even clearer. I automatically reached down to touch him, but he gently stilled my hand. "Just ignore it," he suggested.

"And it'll go away?" I asked, turning to wink at him. But he looked at me, puzzled, and so I added, "It's like the poster at my dentist's in Phoenix: 'Ignore your teeth and they'll go away.'"

"Hmm, it's been a few years since I've been in a dentist's office." He grinned to show me the gleaming white reasons for that, then became more serious. "I didn't mean to distract you. This is an important topic." He kissed my wet fingers and proposed that we move to the bed.

This was never a proposition that I took exception to, and soon we were under the covers of our big white bed, lamps off but the lights of Paris illuminating the bedroom. In one window, beyond a church steeple, I could see the Eiffel Tower glowing.

Edward draped an arm around my waist comfortably. And comfortingly.

"Does it generally hurt?" I asked after a while. I'd had the sex talk with Renee, of course, but she could really speak only from one woman's experience, while Edward, whether he liked it or not, could speak from many.

"Are you worried about that?"

"Yes," I said.

"Are you worried that I'll hurt you?"

"You mean that you'll bite me?"

"Yes," he answered. He sounded curious, not tense, I was pleased to hear. Gianna must have been very convincing in her fantasies about Carlisle, as distasteful as that was to think about. I also knew that while he did worry about misjudging his strength with me, he felt confident about resisting my blood.

"No," I replied. "I'm worried, I think, in the way that human women worry about their first time."

He sighed. "I can't be general about that. It does for some women. And for others it does not. I very much hope you are in the latter group."

It turned out that he had some ideas about making that more likely, and we discussed that for a while before I fell silent again, doodling on his arm with my fingertip.

"Is there something else you want to talk about?" Edward prompted me.

I nodded. This part was more difficult. Carlisle would be shaking his head at me in rebuke at my remaining insecurities. "I'm worried ... well, that after 80 years of waiting, that the experience will be, you know, disappointing," I said. "Anticlimactic."

Edward hooted in laughter and I had to think back to what I had just said. Oh. He calmed down, and stroked my cheek. "I truly, truly don't believe that it will be underwhelming," he answered. "In fact, all evidence indicates that it will be the opposite of _anticlimactic._"

"Fine." I huffed. "Then that it won't be what you expected."

"Ah. I think I know a little bit what to expect by now. After all, even though I've been saving my virtue, as you note, some people would say that we're essentially having sex already."

"But you've _heard _so much …" I said, tapping my temple.

"Most of what I've heard has been daydreams – there's been only one case in which purposefully I lurked outside someone's bedroom, you know, and I didn't get to hear anything then." I gave him a dirty look, and he shrugged. "In any case, I'm well aware that people's fantasy lives are much more active than their real ones, and for good reasons."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"Family stability, legality, flexibility, _geometry … _Truly, our reality has been much better than any fantasy I've been forced to hear. But if you need reassurance on the matter, I'd be happy to provide it. I think showing would be even more convincing than telling."

"Showing is good," I agreed. After all, our talk and his, well, proximity was making me want to rub shamelessly against him.

Happily, he had decided that this part of the conversation required more intimate contact, because he shifted us around so that we were pressed together in a very promising way, with ample evidence that his erection, even ignored, hadn't gone away.

"But I must tell you this," he murmured, "there is one thing about all this that I hadn't expected."

"What?" I managed to get out, despite all the _showing_ going on.

His fingers danced up along my ribs, tickling me so I squirmed and giggled. "I didn't realize there would be so much laughing," he said.

But really, what followed were noises that sounded a lot more like panting.

* * *

><p>The restaurant we went to the next night sat in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne, the big park on Paris's western edge, and was described as an old hunting lodge. But it bore no resemblance to the Lodge back in Forks, nor any hunter's cabin or ice fishing shack I'd ever seen. Instead it was yet another 19th-century villa all in white, with a curving drive in front where a valet took our car, and a series of mirror- and curlicue-heavy rooms inside filled with diners.<p>

The maître d' led us past all this to a terrace dotted with tables and heat lamps and tiny lights and surrounded by hedges. "Will you be warm enough out here?" Edward asked as we stepped out onto the flagstones.

"I think so. And it's such a beautiful evening to be outside." I looked up at the sky, still safely clouded in the twilight, and he laughed. "And if I get cold I'll have absolutely no feelings of guilt in taking your jacket."

It was a completely romantic setting, almost to the point of cliché. I drank down the bubbles in my kir royale with such gusto that Edward ordered me another and then I giggled at the succession of stark white plates that appeared before us, scallops and lamb and vegetables meddled with out of all recognition and dotted with foam. Pretentious but delicious, and the hedges gave Edward a place to jettison his uneaten portions.

Uncharacteristically, he left me for a few minutes to take a phone call after we'd ordered dessert. I used the time to think about our visit earlier in the day to some of Paris's ancient ruins - the Arènes de Lutèce, the arena where wild animals fought each other to amuse the city's Roman rulers, and the Cluny Museum, with the remnants of a public bath sitting nonchalantly across the street from a McDonald's.

I didn't buy a postcard of either to send to Charlie. I figured that he didn't need to wonder just how obsessed I was with old stuff. Instead I got one with a picture of a typical Parisian scene, of boats on the Seine. Edward almost had me convinced that there were topless sunbathers along the river beaches – after all, he had the eyesight to see that - but he finally broke down and admitted that the postcard was safe to send to my father.

"How's the world of mergers and acquisitions?" I teased Edward when he came back from his call. I was familiar enough by now with how the Cullens operated to know that he played a big role in managing their finances, a role he had slipped back into effortlessly. It was a bit intimidating, and a lot sexy, to wake up in the morning to find him murmuring orders about some business negotiation into his phone … and then to see him toss the phone aside so he could murmur dirtily to me.

"It's going surprisingly well. Shall we talk about tomorrow?" Edward said.

"Sure," I agreed, floating on wine and butter. What would we see tomorrow? St. Denis? Versailles? That museum with all the Monets -

"Tomorrow will have fine weather for our wedding day," he said, eying me warily.

"Tomorrow?" I squeaked, now feeling that I had suddenly floated over an abyss and was about to fall. I knew that if we were to marry before returning to Forks to set things in motion for my Volturi-ordered demise, it would have to be here in my fake residence in France, but I figured it would take a few weeks to arrange. There would need to be documents and licenses and, even, I thought, banns to be read.

I hadn't even had time to tell my parents that I was engaged. Or to be truthful, time, and bravery. Renee would hate that I was getting married, and Charlie would hate that I was getting married to Edward.

"Yes, the phone call I just had was confirmation that we can marry tomorrow, if you like." He reached across the table to take my hand. "Which I would like."

"So soon?" I asked, even as his touch eased my spike of nervousness.

"If we wait any longer for our wedding," he said, his voice pitched for secrecy and lust, "we won't be able to adhere to our decision to … wait until our wedding."

His words sent a rush of heat to my face as I remembered last night, my thighs wrapped around his as we moved against each other with perfect timing. That perfection came from Edward's hands on my hips guiding my thrusts, as he had learned to read my body as completely as he couldn't read my mind. And it all felt so slick and right that I bit a pillow so I wouldn't beg him to just move down a little and be inside me where he belonged, my pain and his principles be damned. We were a textbook example of those couples in the filmstrips that Edward had to watch in high school in the 1950s about the Dangers of Heavy Petting.

"Um, you have a point," I said. "But don't we need a license and – "

"And many other documents? And official translations of those documents? Yes."

"And you have that?"

"Yes. The biggest obstacle was the posting of the banns, which I wanted to avoid." Discretion was the better part of vampirism, I knew. He grimaced. "It would have delayed matters. And with our luck, Caius and Victoria would show up as guests."

My wineglass, on its way to my lips, froze in position at my throat. "Could that have really happened?" I asked.

"Alice hasn't seen anything like that, don't worry. And it's irrelevant now."

"Good." I took a healthy swallow from my glass. "So, did you dazzle a French bureaucrat into giving us the go-ahead?"

"I had neither the time nor the patience to bring a French bureaucrat to heel. They are very fond of papers and procedures. But the mayor of the suburb where our house is situated is willing to accommodate us … since we're such generous donors to his father's presidential campaign. I suppose that it's appropriate then that the civil service is a very businesslike affair. It lasts about five minutes. "

I grinned. "That sounds illegal. But great."

"There is a second part," he said, pouring some of his Chateau de Something into my wineglass as if it would soften the blow.

"Which is?"

"A priest at the American Cathedral has agreed to consecrate our marriage afterward … will you do that for me?"

"A _cathedral _… with, like, an aisle?"

"Yes, there is an aisle there."

I looked at him doubtfully.

"But we can walk down it together," he assured me.

"Oh, that's okay, then."

I took a sip from my newly filled glass. "Why do we have to do it twice?"

"The first one is in French, and I'd like you to understand what you're saying yes to. So we'll have one in English too."

"Why don't we just do that one?" I asked, confused.

"Because it doesn't count." I looked at him, now both confused and dubious that he'd say that about a ceremony in a church, and he added, "Well, yes, it counts more for me, but it's not the legal ceremony."

"I don't care," I said, shrugging.

"Your father will. And the cathedral won't consecrate our marriage if there's no marriage to consecrate. So," he said, standing up and tossing his napkin on his chair, "we'll do it?"

I nodded numbly, unable to turn that opening into the double entendre it deserved, because he had dropped to his knee beside me. _Oh, you bastard_, I thought, as conversations quieted around us.

"Remember, you've already said yes," he whispered as he took my hand again and I gaped. "Will you marry me?" he asked more loudly. I nodded again, and he raised an eyebrow.

_You controlling bastard_, I thought, feeling all the eyes on us. I took a breath and, suddenly flooded with a rush of emotion I didn't expect, said, "Yes," with surprising volume. Edward's answering smile was brilliant, and I tugged at his hand so he'd get out his mortifying-for-me position and stand up. We kissed to a smattering of applause before Edward pulled away with a grunt of disgust.

One of our waiters was back, brandishing a bottle of Champagne.

"Avec les compliments de la maison," he said, waiting for us to reseat ourselves, then popping the cork with a deft twist. He poured two glasses, as he had probably done for many newly engaged couples before us. "Felicitations, madame, monsieur."

Edward thanked him politely, but I knew he was cursing la maison. I snickered when the waiter left. "That's what you get for embarrassing me," I told my fiancé after we touched our flutes and he choked down a swallow, aware that everyone was still staring at us.

"No," he said, raising an eyebrow at me, "that's what I get for making it possible for you to truthfully tell your mother that I asked you to marry me over a romantic dinner, instead of when we were in bed naked and discussing the sex lives of vampires and humans."

"Once again, you have a point," I said. "Though I think that Renee will focus on the getting married part rather than the getting engaged part."

"And secretly you liked it a little," he said. He smirked at me, and I noticed that he had somehow managed to make his unwanted Champagne disappear.

"I didn't."

"You did. I know your heartbeat."

"Fine," I conceded "I did. So," I went on, hoping to distract his attention from my girly surge of sentiment, "no big rock?"

He wasn't buying it, but he played along. "I know you better than that, Miss Swan," he said, pointing his finger at me. "I have seen you gaze longingly at books, at food, even one or two times at me –" I shrugged, unable to deny it "- but never at jewelry. You seemed almost nauseated at the thought that I was taking jewelry out of my safe deposit box. Now, it is true that I have my mother's ring …" my eyes widened and he laughed " – no, don't worry, I don't have it with me - and I would like you to have it. I'm certain that she would have liked you to have it. But -"

"Yeah?"

"Well, that really is Victorian. Unlike me," he said pointedly. "And to modern tastes, perhaps a bit unattractive—"

"Unlike you."

"Thank you. Alice says it looks like a cheese grater."

I wrinkled my nose, picturing a grinder with a crank, then a box grater. "It's a big rectangle?"

"No, more like a small oval Microplane."

"Oh, one of those really sharp rasps. They make me nervous."

He looked thoughtful at this. "Perhaps it'd be safer for you to not wear it."

"I'm fine with that." I sipped some more Champagne. A pity he found it so disgusting.

"But," he said, "I do have two rings for us to use tomorrow, if you agree. They belonged to my parents."

I had a flash of sadness – his parents weren't buried with their rings, then. But I pushed it away, because I was also glad that he had these tokens of his human mother and father, especially since he had so few memories of them.

"Hah, I knew you were sneaking out jewelry from that box in Zurich. May I see them?" I said instead, guessing that he was carrying them with him. I guessed right, and he handed over a small velvet bag from which I extracted two gold rings that were as plain as I could have wished. I looked at their inscriptions in the flickering lights of the heat lamps and candles. Initials and dates, and one word.

"Toujours," I read aloud.

"Forever. Always. Toujours," he said, giving me the proper French pronunciation.

"Really? How ... suitable," I said. I looked up at his face to see his pleased expression. "It's perfect. … So, we're all set, then?"

"Almost. You'll have to buy a dress off the rack in the morning."

"Oh, quelle horreur," I said, breaking out one of the few French phrases I knew and pressing my hands to my cheeks in mock dismay.

"I'm sure there are some members of the family saying precisely that right now," Edward said dryly.

A few hours later, he smoothed a sheet over me as I yawned. I was sweaty and naked and wished he would curl up with me longer, but I understood why he was leaving.

"So I guess you're dining al fresco tonight, too?" I observed sleepily, feeling the effects of the Bordeaux I'd drunk and the Edward-induced rushes of endorphins I had recently experienced.

"Indeed. But I won't be out of cellphone range if you need to talk. Though –" he switched off the lamp next to me "—we have a busy schedule tomorrow, and you should get your sleep."

I nodded and yawned again. "Someday I won't need to sleep, you know," I mumbled.

"Yes. It's very sad."

"What?" I started to sit up so I could argue away any regrets about my soon to be lost humanity.

But he continued on, "How will I ever get a break from your incessant groping?" He punctuated this with a grope of his own, a swift caress of my ass over the linen sheet.

I settled back down with a snort. "You know you love it," I told him.

"I do," he said.

* * *

><p>My sleep was dreamless and deep, and it seemed only moments had passed when Edward woke me up. Rain was splattering on the windows, and the Eiffel Tower was lost in the mist. Perfect for us.<p>

Sadly, though, Edward was dressed. At least there was breakfast.

"So what's the plan?" I asked as I considered the food on the mahogany table before me: yogurt, croissants, tiny little strawberries I'd never seen before. It felt a long way from Pop-tarts and cereal on Charlie's warped kitchen table. "Is there a department store nearby or something where I can get a dress?"

"Alice has made you an appointment at a shop on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, a few blocks from here."

"Huh, do I really need to consult with someone on this?"

He shrugged, but said, "It will be more efficient," and I had to agree. I wouldn't know where to start to find the appropriate outfit for a French civil ceremony.

We walked under an umbrella to the shop, all soft white and a dull gold and with a name I didn't recognize, though Edward said it was venerable. A slender white-haired woman in a severe gray dress introduced herself, and when she learned who we were there was a stream of French in which the words "Madame Cullen" figured frequently. _Alice. _

Edward left me so he could go down the street and pick up a suit that Alice had also arranged, and I went upstairs with Madame la vendeuse, whose real name I had forgotten immediately after being told it.

A rack of short white dresses awaited us, along with Madame's much younger but equally slim assistant, and I realized that this must be a big thing here, a chic little dress to wear to city hall, since everyone had to do it. Even to my untutored eye, the dresses looked carefully tailored despite their simple lines, and were free of ornamentation. Any of them would be a good choice, and Alice must have known that.

But none of them spoke to me, and after we'd looked through the rack, the saleswoman – who after Edward had left had demonstrated that her English was quite good – looked at me quizzically. I stared at the caster of the dress rack sinking into the boutique's deep ecru carpeting as she waited for an answer.

I thought about when Edward – a human Edward, who had survived influenza, maybe the war, bootleg liquor and swallowing goldfish at college … and had proposed to some girl, some well-bred Ethel or Mildred who would never have had any idea just how lucky she was – would have married in the normal course of events. The woman coming down the aisle toward him would have worn what, exactly? That is, if she had access to a boutique on the priciest street in Paris …

"Do you have something like, um, a flapper?" I asked. Madame looked at me uncertainly.

"Flapper?" she repeated.

I thought briefly of doing the Charleston, but opted for simplicity. "Like the 1920s," I said.

"Ah, Coco!" she said in satisfaction, adding, "Coco Chanel!" when I looked baffled. I wasn't sure at first that that was what I meant, but then Madame the assistant brought out the perfect dress from some recess of the boutique, so I guessed it was.

It was a pearlescent ivory silk, unconstructed and unrestrictive, sleeveless with a simple scoop neck and a softly draped skirt that would hit a little above my knees. It seemed to fit perfectly, but Madame insisted it needed adjustments, and she attacked me with pins in her mouth.

So I stood on a box in the dressing room, my image reflected all around me, as Madame adjusted the shoulders. The shadows under my eyes were gone, but my arms were still thin and my cleavage was nearly nonexistent. And I guessed it would stay that way.

I kept moving the scoop up for better coverage, and Madame kept moving it down. "American brides don't show as much bosom," I said firmly, and she finally surrendered and sent me off to get lunch.

* * *

><p>"Hello, sweetheart. Can you hold on for a second till I'm in my office?" I heard the beeps of a hospital corridor cut off as Carlisle closed a door. Hospitals were noisy even at 3 a.m. "Now. So how is your day going?" he said, his voice teasing, obviously aware of exactly what I was doing.<p>

"It's been ... interesting," I admitted into my cellphone. "But now Mesdames have allowed me to take a break." I was in a café a few doors away from the boutique, cutting up an omelet but too on edge to eat it.

"Your dress looks lovely," he said.

"How do -" I spluttered.

"Alice just e-mailed me a sketch. It's right in front of me. Appropriately old-fashioned."

"You think so, Dr. Fashionista?"

"Esme had something very like it in 1926," he said fondly. "But in red. And it had the most delicious dip in the back where I could -"

"Um, Carlisle?" I hurriedly interrupted him. As wonderful, and reassuring, as it was to have such definitive proof of conjugal desire after 90 years of marriage, I was too nervous to hear this now.

"Ah, yes," he said, sounding completely unembarrassed. "Well, she got to wear it only the once."

"Uh, okay, please tell Alice thanks for all her help today. I couldn't have done this on my own."

"I'll be sure to," he promised, then chuckled. "Alice sent me a new e-mail. She says you're welcome. I'll cross that off my to-do list, then."

"Soooo," I moved on, "I thought I should take this opportunity to ask you for your permission to marry your son." A surprised silence ensued, which I filled by adding, "He is kinda young, you know."

Carlisle didn't laugh. "By only one measure," my future father-in-law said quietly. "He's grown up quite a lot in the last few months."

"I have too, I think," I realized even as I said it. I was proud of myself for having been able to manage living in foreign countries on my own - except for the whole being captured by Heidi incident, but I could hardly fault myself for that. "Carlisle, I've never really thanked you for your help in getting us back together. Some of what you said was hard to hear, I have to confess, but it was what we needed."

"Of course. And I wouldn't be so presumptuous as to give you permission, Bella. Take my blessing, instead. Have you told your parents?"

"I was able to reach my mom last night. And she was surprisingly okay with it," I said. Renee had been so taken by the romance of our marrying in Paris – in June! - she seemed to have forgotten all her years of admonitions about waiting to get hitched till I was 30. It didn't even seem to bother her that she wouldn't be present. Charlie, though … "I couldn't get through to Charlie, so I'll try him in a few hours. And, well, he's still not happy that Edward and I are together, so I know he'll be upset, even if he doesn't show it - "

"It'll be fine," Carlisle said, sounding confident even though he had absolutely no basis for it. "You are neither the first, nor the last daughter whose father doesn't approve of her husband. But we approve of you."

I had to swallow hard at his words. I watched a puffy-lipped woman in a lab coat walk out into the drizzle with a silver tray and two tiny cups of espresso, then cross the street into a day spa. "Thanks, Carlisle," I was finally able to say. "Thanks for everything. Thank you for making Edward."

"And thank you for making me feel that it was worth it for him. He's given us so much, but sometimes I've wondered if our life would ever give him enough …" He paused for a second. "Ah, Alice now says that you won't be able to reach Charlie at all, that he'll be out of range, but she suggests you leave a message for him at the station so he'll know you tried to tell him."

I briefly contemplated asking if Alice had anything to say about _after _the wedding, but I pushed the thought away. If she had seen anything untoward she would have told Edward, and if she hadn't … well, I trusted him.

"Oh," I said. "Perhaps you could give him a call when he's back? Support him in his imperceptible days of rage?"

Carlisle laughed. "Charlie does keep it well-hidden, I agree. But he'll adjust."

"If there's anyone in the world who can persuade him, it would be you."

* * *

><p>I returned to the shop to find the dress waiting for me, as well as items that "Madame Cullen" had arranged to be delivered – low-heeled T-straps, a white wrap, an old-style, loose teddy. "Very <em>flapper<em>," Madame said in approval, savoring the new word.

Now I was dressed and coiffed and all I needed was the groom. Madame looked out the window at the gray sky as we waited. The rain had stopped, but the clouds still looked threatening, and pedestrians did not linger. "I think the sun will never appear today," she said.

_Thank God._

"Ah, perhaps it is better," Madame said philosophically. "We have an old maxim, 'Mariage pluvieux, mariage heureux.' Rainy wedding, happy marriage. So it is good luck for - oh là là."

Huh, French people really said that? But I understood why. A black car with a vaguely retro air had pulled up in the street below us in a no-parking spot and Edward had stepped out of the driver's side. Holy hell, he looked fabulous - beautifully wild hair, amber eyes, snow white cuffs peeking out of a dark blue suit. In a few seconds he was upstairs, complimenting Madame's work and making her blush, and regarding me appreciatively.

I did the same to him, for up close he looked even more magnificent. He was born to wear a suit, and I'd bet that he felt more comfortable in one than in the jeans and sweatshirts his teenager's disguise required. "The tailors probably thought they'd died and gone to heaven when they got their hands on you," I said, unable to stop from stroking his lapels. Madame stepped away to give us privacy.

He shrugged. "They already had my measurements, so there wasn't much they needed to do. Besides, a vanishingly small number of people enjoying having their hands on me. Or mine on them." His voice grew quieter, yet darker, and some of the tension in my body seemed to liquefy as his fingers tightened on my waist. "And there is only one person I want my hands on. Let's go to our wedding," he said, leading me downstairs.

I cocked my head at the unfamiliar car in the street. "I don't recognize this," I confessed.

"It's a Bristol," he said, in the tone of voice one would say, "It's a Giacometti," or "It's a Stradivarius."

I looked at the car, and then him, significantly, and he said, "You know, it's my wedding day too." He opened the passenger door for me.

"You are such a ... Cullen," I said, stepping into the Bristol, thinking of Carlisle's disquisition on vampires and cars. That seemed so long ago.

"And in a few minutes, you will be too."

"_What_?" The door closed on my exclamation. I realized that we hadn't discussed names. It was a topic that occupied us for most of the short drive to Neuilly.

* * *

><p>From Edward's description of the ceremony, I expected that we'd be married in some small office at the city hall, but the salle des mariages was impressive, with red velvet chairs, frescoes of cavorting lovers and huge windows overlooking rows of severely pruned, damp chestnut trees. Through a pair of open doors behind us, I could hear heels clicking along a marble hallway.<p>

Edward had just introduced me to two older women - our witnesses, employees of a local law firm that had some connection to the Cullen lawyer - when the mayor walked in. He was tall and thin and looked too young and nervous to be the president of his high school junior class, much less the mayor of a large town, an impression heightened by the tricolor sash he wore over his suit. He was followed by a stout blond woman carrying a sheaf of documents, discontent obvious on her face.

"Who's she?" I whispered.

"His aide, and the person who really runs the place," Edward whispered back. "She's dismayed that we've skipped some steps in the processing of our documents, and she's giving her boss grief about it."

The bureaucrat and the politician moved to stand behind an oak table in front of us, the woman slightly behind her gangly boss.

''Veuillez vous lever,'' the mayor said, his voice cracking, and I stood up a second after Edward, our hands clasped. "Nous allons procéder à la célébration du mariage de Monsieur Edward Cullen avec Mademoiselle Isabella Swan.'' Our names sounded odd nestled among all the French words. ''A-t-il été fait un contrat de mariage?''

One squeeze of my hand for yes, two squeezes for no. Edward gave me two. "Non," we answered. No prenup for us.

"Conformément à la loi, '' the mayor continued, and there followed a stream of words that Edward had told me was a recitation of French civil code, until I finally heard my name again.

"Mademoiselle Isabella Swan, consentez-vous à prendre pour époux Monsieur Edward Cullen, ici présent ?''

One squeeze. ''Oui,'' I answered.

''Monsieur Edward Cullen, consentez-vous à prendre pour épouse Mademoiselle Isabella Swan, ici présente?'' I helpfully squeezed Edward's hand once, just in case he'd forgotten, and the side of his mouth curled up as he also said, "Oui.''

''Au nom de la loi,'' the mayor intoned, ''je déclare Monsieur Edward Cullen et Mademoiselle Isabella Swan unis par le mariage.''

Wow, that _was_ quick. The exchange of rings was equally brisk, even if the kiss that followed was not, and then we and the witnesses had to sign papers under the eye of the sour-faced aide, who handed over a little booklet of documents. I was surprised when, after the witnesses had kissed my cheeks and we accepted the congratulations of the mayor, who looked as relieved as I was that this was over, to see a small crowd lingering in the doorway, gawking in a very un-French way.

I couldn't blame them. My husband – my God, _my husband_ – looked absurdly amazing.

* * *

><p>The Bristol took us back into the city, past our hotel and then a short way down the Avenue Georges V before stopping at a church with an extremely tall spire. One of the valets from the hotel was waiting on the sidewalk, and I realized why Edward had said the location was so convenient. A clever boy, that one.<p>

But …"I'm not an Episcopalian, you know," I whispered conspiratorially, looking up at the American Cathedral's Gothic Revival façade after the valet had helped me out of the car, holding an umbrella over me to protect me from the renewed drizzle, and Edward had handed over the keys.

"That's okay, because I am," he said as we walked up the church steps. I smirked at him, pretty sure some fraud was involved, and he added, "At least the priest here has a baptismal certificate from the lawyer that says I am."

"Does the priest also have written permission from your parents since you're under-age?" I couldn't help say to tease him, and he decided it was time for payback.

"Watch your tongue, _Mrs. Cullen_," he said, reminding me of my agreement to take the name when we returned home, having been persuaded by his argument that I'd be able to use it for only a few years. "Or I'll dazzle Mother Brownlee into putting an 'obey' in your vows."

Mother Brownlee was a brunette in her 50s with a warm smile and a Southern accent who was as petite as Alice, and we dutifully handed over to her our certificat de célébration civile, our proof that we were legally married. The priest muttered a bit about our lack of premarital counseling (which would have been interesting: "So, Bella, what are your expectations of marriage?" "Eternal devotion, immortality, and lots of hunting"), but Edward soothed her scruples with some well-chosen assurances/lies until she sent us off with the cathedral's wedding coordinator to get ready.

I wasn't sure that the wedding coordinator, another American woman in her 50s named Margaret, needed to be involved in our no-frills ceremony. But she bustled around, handing me a charming bouquet of tiny white lily of the valley -"Very appropriate," Edward murmured to me. "They're venomous" - having Edward and me walk up the aisle for practice and taking me off to fuss with my hair while Edward talked to the organist.

Margaret was waiting with me in the narthex when the music started. It wasn't the usual Mendelssohn wedding march and I was overcome by giggles. Margaret looked alarmed.

Instead it was "Sheep May Safely Graze" - which I knew because Edward had played it for me in Forks as I sat next to him on the piano bench. He also was able to play it with only a tiny fraction of his attention, so much so that I'd started calling it "Lips May Safely Graze."

"It's just a joke we have," I said, and Margaret nodded, probably wondering how two teenagers had made a joke out of Bach.

"Are you ready?" Edward said, suddenly next to me, and Margaret startled in a way I no longer did. "Mother Brownlee is waiting," he added, nodding to the woman in priestly garb at the altar.

"Oh, goodness, go," Margaret shooed us, her breath hitching, and we made our way to the strains of Bach, the church cavernous and soaring around us – classic Gothic inside too, no nausea-inducing oculus allowed. Our witnesses were here again, in the second row, and we sat in front of them. Across the aisle were some women from the church offices, I thought, and maybe the altar guild. There were the usual readings, and I was glad for the church women, who helped make up for the fact that I knew almost none of the responses.

Then it was time for Edward and me to stand up in front of everyone. "Edward," Mother Brownlee said, "you have taken Bella to be your wife. Do you promise to love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, to be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?"

Edward's "I do" was strong and sure, and the church women emitted little sighs.

"Bella, you have taken Edward to be your husband. Do you promise to love him, comfort him, honor and keep him, in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all others, to be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?

"I do," I whispered, emotion coursing through me as I made promises I could understand.

We lifted our left hands, and the priest continued, "Bless, O Lord, these rings to be signs of the vows by which this man and this woman have bound themselves to each other." She joined our right hands, flinching a little at the feeling of Edward's skin, and added, "Those whom God has joined together let no one put asunder."

"No one," Edward repeated in my ear, and I knew he was thinking of Aro. I wasn't sure the Volturi cared what God had done, but if God wanted to get involved I would appreciate the help.

There were more prayers, because Episcopalians are apparently very wordy, but finally the priest let us kiss each other, and the ladies in the congregation shook my hand and kissed my cheeks as Edward whispered to Mother Brownlee. Then the organist started playing something complicated and sprightly, and Edward practically flew me down the aisle.

That was fine with me: after all, we were married and blessed and our hotel was just down the street.

* * *

><p>Another couple, another Edward and Bella, might have stumbled into the suite, high from anticipation and the Champagne toast at the church rectory, kicking off their shoes and joyously tumbling onto the bed. He would have pushed her dress up, she would have shoved his pants down, and they would have consummated their marriage in spontaneity and blissful ignorance of hands too cold to touch and deadly strength held in check.<p>

But we were not that Edward and Bella.

Instead, Edward undressed me slowly as the bed heated, touching my skin only with his lips, leaving my old-fashioned lingerie in place. He stripped off his clothes as I stared and we slid under the covers.

As we waited, he said, "I think we're never going to want to leave this bed, but I have an idea, a place we won't need this." He tugged at the electric blanket. "There's an island off Brazil where we'll be alone, and we can get to Rio in 11 hours from here. We'd have to cut short our time in Paris."

"Yes," I said promptly. "Though I don't want to leave this bed either."

"We'll have all day tomorrow before the flight leaves." He smiled slyly, and fingered the strap of the teddy. "Did you really picture me marrying a flapper?" He'd obviously seen our conversation replayed in Madame's head.

"Yeah. Myrtle. She's got a cute little blond bob, and mixes a mean Manhattan."

He grimaced. "No more alcohol today, please. I think I would have preferred a woman with long brown hair who knows how to make pies," he said, and I remembered him watching me rolling out a piecrust for Charlie, his gaze burning into my body as I worked. "With these hands," he added, taking hold of them and bringing them to his lips. I gasped, because he was warm enough now, and I pulled his hands to my chest, the contact making me shudder.

He inhaled sharply, and his fingers broke free from mine to trail down my arm, tracing the scar left by James and then back up, exploring as if he had never touched me before. The contact was so simple, yet somehow beyond erotic.

He continued this way, touching me everywhere my skin was exposed, gently, slowly, humming softly, making my nerves hum under his fingers – my shoulders, my collarbone, my face, my knees. And then my teddy was unsnapped and gone, and his hands went into new territory, along my back and stomach and hips, again, again, at the same maddening pace. I longed to touch him, but he pushed my fingers away, reminding me of what we had talked about. "Let me focus on you this time, not on me," he murmured, and my hands dropped back to the mattress.

But it was like torture, however sweet. His goal was to arouse, not satisfy, and his movements over my breasts, on the inside of my thighs, on my sex, were light and unhurried, as if nothing in the world mattered more than touching me in just this way. After minutes, after hours, he kept his fingers between my legs and his lips on my neck, the pressure the same as his skin slid over mine, exquisite yet never enough, and my moans were uncontrollable and my fingernails clawed the sheets.

"Please, please, please," I whimpered, and suddenly Edward was above me, and in me, and it was … such a fucking relief, and strange and weird and painless and overwhelming and wonderful. Then I forgot all that because he was coming, I knew it from his face, and now I knew what it felt like when he was inside me. I grinned at him when his eyes opened, and he grinned back.

"We're okay," I said. It was both observation and reassurance.

"More than okay," he said. "And we're not done."

"It's an advantage to traveling with you," I agreed.

Then his hips started a rhythm that was instinctive and evolutionary yet ours alone, and his hand moved to where we were joined, and my universe became his sounds in my ear, his taste in my mouth, his back rippling under my hands, his body stroking mine. My skin flushed hot and I arched, and then Edward knew what it felt like when I came when he was inside me, what it felt like when I came and he was coming too.

"We did it," I said after I caught my breath, elated, and he laughed.

"Oh, we certainly _did it_."

"Oooh, the 17-year-old in you comes out after hiding behind that fancy suit."

"Always," he said, smirking, and I broke into giggles at his smug expression, until he stopped them with a kiss. Then we talked of this extraordinary day, and Brazil, and plans for the future that involved a lot of touching until the talk of touching turned into actual touching, and the day turned into a night of love and laughter.

We might not have the innocence and obliviousness of that other Edward and Bella, but we would have their joy.

* * *

><p>At least we would have it for a night.<p>

Because when I woke up Edward wasn't next to me. I blinked and sat up in the grayness of early morning Paris, and saw him framed in the doors to the sitting room. Not sitting, but standing inhumanly still, fully clothed, phone to his ear, only his lips moving in an indecipherable hiss. So not a stockbroker or the lawyer, but someone in the family. His eyes met mine and I knew something was wrong.

I yanked at the sheet – it had been replaced and tucked back during the night - for something to cover me, but a second later Edward was wrapping me in a hotel robe, then pulling me close, the phone tossed to the bed.

"Alice?" I asked, almost unnecessarily.

"Yes."

"The Volturi?" I guessed, my voice faint.

"Victoria."

I nodded, slightly relieved, but only slightly. "Our deciding to go to Isle Esme made puzzle pieces move around, and Alice saw that Victoria has plans involving Forks," Edward said. "I still want us to go to Isle Esme, keep you safely away from her -" oddly harmonious squawking erupted from the phone, still connected to our psychic "—but Alice says that this won't end well if we do."

"What does she want? Can you tell?"

"She wants to lure us back to Forks, Alice thinks, so she can punish us for James." The phone was silent now. "And she's planning to … put your father in danger to do that."

"But that doesn't make sense," I said, even as my heart raced and the scar on my wrist seemed to throb in time with it. "She can't get to Charlie with all your family around."

"That would be true if it was just her, but it's not just her," Edward said bleakly. "She's made new vampires to help her."

My stomach twisted. "We have to go back, even if that's exactly what she wants."

"I know."

The squawking from the phone started again.

* * *

><p>And so I'm back on a plane, leaving Europe behind. Less than six months ago, I was flying the other direction, alone, heartbroken, angry, my future uncertain. Now my future is still uncertain, the magnitude of the danger we face unknown, but my heart is whole, and I have what I need most in the seat next to me, our sides touching as if we were welded together. The certainty of what we feel for each other will get us through the days ahead of planning and questions and violence.<p>

If Edward hadn't decided to set up a scholarship fund for me, if I hadn't been so hurt and insulted enough to drop out of school and skip town, what would have happened? Maybe Laurent would have found me before the wolves found him. Maybe Victoria would have chomped on me as I did the dishes at Charlie's. Maybe I would have remained so despairing that I would have jumped off a cliff … or, heaven help me, gone out with Mike Newton.

We had been irrational and insecure, each in our own way, but our foolishness had set in motion events that made us partners legally, physically, and before God.

"What are you thinking?" Edward asks, his breath washing over my cheek, his voice soft under the white noise of the plane and the bustling of flight attendants. I look down at his hand on my waist, at his father's gold ring on his finger.

"Fate, multiple paths, what would have happened if you had been less of a bastard," I say.

His expression lightens for the first time on a day that had started so ominously. "I won't apologize for being a bastard since it led you back to me," he says. "Or you to me, however you want to look at it."

"Well, just don't do it again," I tell him.

He somehow manages to pull me even closer as he says. "I promise, the scholarship fund is permanently closed." I nod in approval.

"But," he adds, "we can always learn from each other."

_-fin -_

* * *

><p><em>Yep, that's the end. Though – I have an idea for a future take (not the fight, which I have no interest in rewriting, other than to say I prefer the movie version to the book version in which Bella is told how useless she is). I'm just not sure if I will add it here or send it as a review reply. <em>

_Otherwise, I'm still translating "The Eyes of the Moon," and I'm working on a new story, which will be an AU of the first book called "There's a Word for It." I can't say when that'll start posting, so put me on author alert if you're interested. _

_I borrowed the cheese grater line from Cleolinda, whose summary of BD2 will doubtless be better than the movie itself. The technique Edward uses on the wedding night is a version of orgasmic meditation. _

_No comments from Mr. Price this time. He's a little put out that the version of this chapter that I gave him to read was censored with these words: _The cumquat you don't get to read.

_N.B.: This was pretty much the wedding Mr. Price and I would have had (though with, like, people and food) if we hadn't decided to return to the States for the ceremony. But if you're American non-resident of France and hoping to get married in Paris, it's virtually impossible unless you've got Cullen resources._

_Thanks to everyone for lovely reviews and patience._

Here are the translations:

"Avec les compliments de la maison. Felicitations, madame, monsieur." _Compliments of the house. Congratulations._

Madame la vendeuse: _roughly. Ms. Saleswoman_.

'' Veuillez vous lever. Nous allons procéder à la célébration du mariage de Monsieur Edward Cullen avec Mademoiselle Isabella Swan.'A-t-il été fait un contrat de mariage ? '' _Please stand. We will now proceed with the marriage of Mr. Edward Cullen and Miss Isabella Swan. Is there a marriage contract/prenuptial agreement?_

"Conformément à la loi, ' _In accordance with the law_

"Mademoiselle Isabella Swan, consentez-vous à prendre pour époux Monsieur Edward Cullen, ici présent ?'' _Miss Isabella Swan, do you agree to take Mr. Edward Cullen as your spouse ?_

''Au nom de la loi, je déclare Monsieur Edward Cullen et Mademoiselle Isabella Swan unis par le mariage.'' _In the name of the law, I declare Mr. Edward Cullen and Miss Isabella Swan united in matrimony._


End file.
